Jennifer Lopez Marks First Wedding Anniversary with Ben Affleck in a Very JLo Way

How has it already been a year since Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s surprise Las Vegas wedding? July 16 marked one year for the Afflecks, and, as one does when you’re JLo, the multihyphenate marked the occasion with a new song, “Midnight Trip to Vegas.”

Yesterday—one day after the anniversary of the couple’s wedding at the Little White Chapel—Lopez teased her new song, writing on Instagram “One year since our Midnight Trip To Vegas…Go to On The JLo for a special surprise…#ThisIsMeNow,” accompanying two snaps of her wearing a white minidress decorated with rhinestones, which she wore on Sunday to an anniversary dinner with her husband at Giorgio Baldi restaurant in Santa Monica.

Later, in her On the JLo newsletter, Lopez revealed the lyrics to the new song, as well as a clip of her singing. Some of the track’s lyrics include “Then you whispered in my ear / Said let’s get out of here / We can disappear tonight / What about a / Midnight trip to Vegas / Just me and you, baby / Throw the kids in the back / Of the pink Cadillac / And us in the bathroom changing / Midnight trip to Vegas / Both our hearts are racin’ / I’ll pick you up late / We don’t have to wait / Yeah, let’s do something crazy,” which is pretty much exactly what happened in real life on July 16, 2022.

Per People, the new song marks the first glimpse into Lopez’s upcoming album This is Me…Now, the successor to 2002’s This is Me…Then, also inspired by Affleck. 

Last year at this time, on July 17, 2022, Lopez revealed she and Affleck—after a 20-year wait—had tied the knot at last: “We did it,” she wrote to her fans in her newsletter. “Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient…Last night, we flew to Vegas, stood in line for a license with four other couples, all making the same journey to the wedding capital of the world. Behind us, two men held hands and held each other. In front of us, a young couple who made the three-hour drive from Victorville on their daughter’s second birthday—all of us wanting the same thing—for the world to recognize us as partners and to declare our love to the world through the ancient and nearly universal symbol of marriage.”

Lopez then paid homage to the pink Cadillac mentioned in her new track: “We barely made it to the little white wedding chapel by midnight. They graciously stayed open late a few minutes, let us take pictures in a pink Cadillac convertible evidently once used by the king himself (but if we wanted Elvis himself to show, that cost extra, and he was in bed),” she wrote. “We read our own vows in the little chapel and gave one another the rings we’ll wear for the rest of our lives. They even had a Bluetooth for the (short) march down the aisle. But in the end, it was the best possible wedding we could have imagined. One we dreamed of long ago and one made very real (in the eyes of the state, Las Vegas, a pink convertible, and one another) at very, very long last.”

Lopez and Affleck first began dating in July 2002 and were engaged by that November. They postponed their September 2003 wedding just days before the ceremony and reunited in 2021 and became engaged for the second time in April 2022. The July 16 ceremony came about a month before a more formal ceremony which took place on August 20 at Affleck’s home in Georgia.