Love, loneliness and Bennifer 2.0

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Some things bracket an era. Bennifer was one of them. In 2002, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, riding the crest of a thrilling wave of success and talent, became the couple Bennifer - inaugurating an era where celebrity couples were serialised by a rising tribe of paparazzi, for a public ready to consume and judge in an unending cycle.

There was a cinematic excess to Bennifer, or as my friend R said, "they were muchness and more". So much good looks, so much success, so many diamonds, on rings, on toilet seats; a romance so fecund it birthed a whole JLo album and the unforgettable video of Jenny From the Block, featuring Affleck kissing J Lo's famous butt, making us gasp.

Now the two are rumoured to be back together, an event dubbed Againnifer.

Consistent Pragmatics don't care - they are oblivious to popular culture. Anthropologetics begin with caveats - guilty pleasure, distraction in pandemic - then justify their interest in anthropological terms, the politics of gender, race, media cultures and new anthropologies of permissible relationships, parsing them for addictive cycles, rebound dynamics vaghera.

Confronting these with sad faces are Hardcore Romantics (yes, I am in that party), who are like, "But have you considered it could be love?"

Some of my Hardcore Romantics category friends, object to JenBen: "No yaar, he is not good enough for her", echoing many. But I ask, who has made this rule, that amazing women must further validate their amazingness by snagging a partner who is their equal in amazingness? Doesn't this feel a little matrimonial, a little too status conscious? What's better than a big-energy, high-achieving creative woman with a slightly dheela partner, who provides good hugs, passionate intensity, respectful admiration, fun times and allows her to focus on being awesome instead of being competitive or constantly judging her by #BoreMatKarYaar ideas of achievement?

By their own admission, Bennifer could not weather the tabloid storm, and the result of endless scrutiny. Sometimes, doesn't it feel like we too have turned this judging scrutiny of tabloids to our own intimate lives? As we swiftly assess matches on dating apps, analyse the suitability of relationships on a grid of appropriateness, neatness, templates of self-improvement, wokeness, we have inhabited a time of, what I like to call, emotional efficiency. We want to know the meaning and worth of a relationship before we enter it (an emotional equivalent of arranged marriage?). We foreclose fertile political conversations about difference, contradictions, eroticism, emotion, discomfort with slightly sanitised, politically correct templates, creating an apirational emotional life that fears vulnerability, that judges so much, it is terrified of being judged, making mistakes, found imperfect or engaging with another's imperfectness. We have unlearned some bad political habits, but also made ourselves a little lonely. But we have had a lot of alone time this past year to contemplate the wisdom - and not - of our ways.

As Bill and Melinda Gates on the one hand and Kim and Kanye on the other, split, Bennifer feels like it brackets that era of productive coupledom, transitioning us to a time when relationships aren't necessarily cool, idealisable or lasting - not efficient. Maybe as Bennifer cycle back to each other after 17 years with new learnings, we too are entering a time where our learnings of the last decades will give us confidence to embrace messy and vulnerable loves again.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com