Jennifer Lopez once criticized over reports she got married too soon

Jennifer Lopez has been married four times in her search for true love. But she’s married some potential suitors faster than others. When a critic questioned Lopez’s decision to marry one of her exes shortly after dating, the singer didn’t hold back with her response.

How Jennifer Lopez Reacted to the Idea of ​​Getting Married Too Soon

Lopez is known to have married several of her significant others shortly after she began dating them. She met her first husband, Ojani Noa, in 1996 and married him a year later. Similarly, Lopez married her second husband, Cris Judd, in 2001. This was just a year after Lopez met the dancer on the set of her music video for “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.”

But Lopez’s marriage to Anthony was a much quicker process than her two previous marriages. Lopez had already been friends with Anthony for a long time, having met the singer in 1998. But she and Anthony didn’t start dating until 2004, shortly after Lopez split from Ben Affleck. The couple tied the knot in June of that same year.

At the time, Lopez was aware of all the rumors circulating about her failed relationships. Her failed marriages and relationships with people she didn’t marry, like Affleck and Diddy, caused some to question Lopez’s decisions about romance. According to the Irish Examiner, Lopez slammed critics of her love life. One critic in particular who questioned Lopez’s decision to get married as soon as she did.

“Misrepresented, misjudged. I was on a TV show yesterday and I was telling them I wanted to set boundaries in my personal life and the interviewer said, ‘What if I told you you got married too young?’ I thought, ‘Well, you have no right to judge me, you don’t know what happened,’” she recalled. “People think they know the facts, but they don’t. Some of it is completely made up, some of it is based on truth, and some of it is a soap opera that they create.”

Lopez added that she relies mostly on her instincts when deciding who and how to marry.

“I’m a human being and I make decisions. I follow my heart, I make mistakes and I just move on. I’m a woman. Well, I’m a girl and I absolutely believe in love. That’s the only thing,” she said.

Jennifer Lopez knew very quickly that her marriage to Marc Anthony was a mistake

Lopez’s marriage to Anthony lasted the longest of all her relationships, with the two staying together until 2011 before finalizing their divorce in 2014. But looking back, Lopez had second thoughts about her newfound romance with Anthony long before that.

“I lasted seven years there,” Lopez once said. IN(via Us Weekly) “I knew very quickly it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

However, Lopez didn’t let the disappointment of her and Anthony’s divorce discourage her from finding the perfect man for her.

“When my marriage ended, it wasn’t easy to find forgiveness. It wasn’t the dream I had hoped for, and it would have been easier to fan the flames of resentment, disappointment and anger. But Marc is the father of my children, and that will never go away. So I have to work to make things right. And that is definitely the hardest job I do,” Lopez said.

Why Jennifer Lopez’s First Two Marriages ‘Don’t Really Count’

As for Lopez, being with Anthony may have been the first time she experienced a real marriage. She didn’t consider her first two marriages to Noa and Judd to be nearly as solid.

“I’ve been married three times: once for nine months and once for eleven, so I don’t really count the days,” she said on her YouTube channel Jennifer Lopez.

“I was married to Marc for 10 years, with children. I was very young the first two times I tried to get married,” she added. “I say ‘tried’ to get married.”