Actor Ben Affleck got very candid about his drinking during a recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show. The father of three opened up about how he started to struggle with his sobriety once he began to feel "trapped" in his marriage to Jennifer Garner.
Ben told the shock jockey how he started drinking scotch and passing out on his couch.
According to Ben, the trouble in his marriage started after his kids were born. "I was like, 'I can't leave because of my kids, but I'm not happy. What do I do?' And what I did was I drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution," he explained to Howard.
He and Jen were married from 2005 to 2018.
Ben described how getting out of his marriage was the cure for his drinking, saying that had he stayed, he'd probably still be up to his old tricks. "We probably would've ended up at each other's throats," he explained. "I probably still would've been drinking. Part of why I started drinking was because I was trapped."
It's worth noting that Ben has checked into rehab a few times over the years, starting in 2001 and continuing through his final stay in 2018.
Even though their marriage didn't work out, Ben seems to have nothing but love for his ex-wife.
It sounds like Ben and Jen's decision to divorce was an amicable one in the end. "Everything you read [in the news about the divorce] was bulls—," he said. "The truth was we took our time, we made our decision. We grew apart."
According to Ben, he still loves and respects Jen, but they're better off as co-parents than they were as husband and wife — which, given his recently rekindled romance with Jennifer Lopez, we totally agree with.
Fans were quick to criticize Ben's comments online, though.
People were not happy about the way Ben seemed to shift the blame for his drinking onto Jen, and they made their opinions known on Twitter. "When you can't accept that your drinking problem is because of you, you still have a drinking problem," wrote one person. "Jennifer Garner didn't drive Ben Affleck to drink — she did, however, drive him to rehab, probably saving his life."
Another called attention to Ben's previous bad behaviors. "So casually cruel in the name of being honest," the person wrote, adding that Ben was drinking long before he met Jen.
We think Ben would've been better served by keeping those thoughts to himself.
We love Ben — and honestly, we love him even more now that Bennifer's back together — but we do think that his statements about his drinking come off a bit like he's passing the blame. And considering everything he was accused of doing to Jen during their marriage (such as cheating with their nanny), we think Ben is better off keeping the focus on all of the joy that Bennifer gives his fans rather than drawing attention back to his bad-boy ways.
