Ben Affleck Explained Why His Relationships End Badly, Upsetting Ex-Girlfriends

Ben Affleck once explained to Playboy Magazine why his relationships ended badly, attributing it to “passive-aggressive rage.”

Although Affleck made the comments in 1999, before his marriages to Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez both failed, some fans are connecting the insights to his recent behavior. In the Playboy interview, he said that most past girlfriends tended to be upset with him, with the exception of actress Gwyneth Paltrow, with whom he had managed to maintain a friendship. A September 4 post of a key passage from the Playboy interview on Reddit attracted hundreds of comments.

“Probably justifiably so,” he told Playboy of past girlfriends being upset with him. “If I were the next guy to go out with them I’m sure I would be nodding in agreement about what an [expletive] their ex-boyfriend was. It’s not like I was a womanizer or physically abusive or psychologically abusive or whatever. It’s just that these relationships never end well.”

He also told People,

I’m not too guarded. What’s fun for me is flirting and having a good time–that’s really fun. But a lot of times it’s much more fun than all the (expletive), the responsibilities and compromises that go along with sustaining a relationship that I hardly have enough energy for at the end of the day. But I like flirting and meeting somebody and saying hi and letting it happen. In this day and age, as soon as you sleep with somebody it conjures up this whole set of issues and you’ve created this whole thing. There’s this responsibility. It’s almost more appealing to just be flirtatious and have a good time.

The interview with Playboy is still online. In fact, Playboy reshared it on X on September 5 after it was rediscovered.

Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck on August 20, according to TMZ, after two years of marriage. “Ben has a darkness to him that no other person can fix,” a source told Page Six. “Jen Garner couldn’t fix it, all the success in the world couldn’t fix it.”

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Ben Affleck Explained the Dynamic That Led to His Past Relationships Failing

The Playboy article says that, at the time of the interview, Affleck was a movie star who had previously dated Paltrow, describing their post-breakup relationship as “complicated” but friendly. He admitted that other girlfriends were upset with him and explained:

I think what happens is, I end up wanting to be out of the relationship. During the course of a relationship, if you get dissatisfied and unhappy and don’t say something, if you don’t deal with it right then, it just festers and stays there. So instead of saying, ‘Look, don’t do that, please don’t act this way,’ I go along with it until I just don’t want to be in the relationship at all. Then I create some incident or do something or just don’t call. And then she’s pissed. And I can’t necessarily blame her at that point since I’ve developed such a passive-aggressive rage that I have no sympathy and tell her, ‘Well of course I didn’t call you. If you weren’t such a nagging, shrewish harpy I’d call you.’ But that hopefully is something I’m growing out of.

Reddit commenters attached Affleck’s old comments to his current relationship failing. “This is a great example of why self-awareness as a trait is meaningless on its own if you don’t have the emotional maturity to actually do something about the pattern you keep finding yourself in. This man figured it out more than 2 decades ago and then decided to keep inflicting himself on his partners hoping they’d fix him somehow,” wrote one.

“Narrator: He never grew out of it,” wrote another. “This is what a lot of people have said…he’s great at the chase and the lovey-dovey beginning of the relationship but gets bored once that’s over and the real relationship that requires effort begins and he nopes on out of there,” another person wrote on Reddit.

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Ben Affleck Told Playboy That He Is Not a ‘One-Night-Stand Kind of Guy’

Affleck did not always enjoy so much attention from women, Playboy reported.

“Affleck likes to say that he was once a gangly and awkward teenager who was shunned by girls,” Playboy wrote. The article recounted Affleck’s childhood struggles dealing with an alcoholic father and parental divorce.

He told Playboy that more women wanted him after he became famous.

Affleck also revealed in the interview that too-forward women turned him off, saying, “Anyway, I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy. To me, sex is much, much better and much more interesting and satisfying when it’s got a psychological element to it. When I don’t know the person, I tend not to be that into it.”

Of public attention on his relationships, he told Playboy, “One of the weirdest things in my life was the time I had fallen asleep on my couch watching television and was dreaming about this relationship I had with this woman. When I woke up I was watching CNN and there was this story about me and this woman. On CNN. I thought, This is madness. It felt sort of weird like I was living somebody else’s life.”

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