Ben Affleck has opened up about his split with Jennifer Garner in an interview, reported Entertainment Tonight. On SiriusXM‘s The Howard Stern Show, Affleck, 49, recalled the events leading up to his divorce with Garner.
Amid the breakup, the actor denounces the “f**king disgusting lies” that surfaced in the media.
“The truth was, we took our time, we made a decision, we grew apart. We had a marriage that did not work. This happens,” he asserted. “It is somebody I love and respect, but to whom I should not be married any longer.”
“And then we said, ‘You know what? We tried. We tried, because we had kids,'” Affleck continued, “and then both of us felt like, ‘We don’t want this to be the model that our kids see of marriage.'” They have three children – Violet, 16, Seraphina, 12, and Samuel, nine.
He believes that he and his ex “would have ended up at each other’s throats,” and he “would probably still be drinking” had they not ended their relationship.
“That was part of why I started drinking alcohol, I was trapped,” he said of his marriage to Garner, who is also 49. “I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I am not happy. What do I do?’ What I did was drink a bottle of scotch on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”
Affleck said that the couple “ended things amicably” when it was time to do so.
“Did we have moments of tension? Did we have disagreements over the custody? Was stuff difficult for us? Did we get angry? Yes,” he confessed.
“But fundamentally it was always underpinned with respect. I knew she was a good mom. I hope that she knew that I was a good dad. I was. I had to get sober, I knew that too and I acknowledged that. I said, ‘You’re right. I’ve got to quit drinking’.”
They began dating in mid-2004 after meeting on the sets of Pearl Harbor (2001) and Daredevil (2003). They wed in 2005 in a private ceremony in the Turks and Caicos, an idyllic group of coral isles in the Atlantic. Their marriage ended in 2018. /TISG