Jennifer Lopez explains why she and Ben Affleck don’t usually stroll together. The Hustlers actress, 53, explained why she’s frequently seen a step behind her actor husband while they’re holding hands on Live with Kelly and Mark.
“Ben is 6’3, 6’4, and I am tiny — I’m smaller. I’m like, 5’6. But we make it work,” Lopez said on the show, noting that they often hold hands because they are “very affectionate.”
“He’s taller and his arm’s up, and I walk like a step behind, just to compensate,” she continued. “Which I’m fine with.”
Hosts Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, who announced in March that they, too, “are arm-length incompatible,” agreed that holding hands was difficult owing to their arm-length differences. Consuelos saw that his arms were 4 inches longer than his torso, whereas Ripa’s arms were 4 inches shorter.
Ripa joked with Lopez that walking a step behind her spouse was a “good tip” and that she and Consuelos would “steal that.” Lopez spoke out earlier this week about Affleck taking on the role of stepfather to her two children.
While speaking to Hoda Kotb on Today, Lopez raved about the AIR star, saying, “Well, he’s a wonderful, wonderful father. And a father figure to [Max and Emme] as well, because he has his own three beautiful children, and then there’s us.”
“He’s fantastic. He really steps up to the challenge of what that is and what that means,” she continued of Affleck, 50. “And they love him. They love him. And they appreciate him, and so do I.”
Lopez and Marc Anthony, 54, have 15-year-old twins Max and Emme. Affleck is also the father of three children, Samuel, 11, Seraphina, 14, and Violet, 17, whom he shares with ex Jennifer Garner.
Lopez opened up to PEOPLE last year about rekindling her romance with Affleck years after they’d called off their engagement, saying this time they “had a little bit of fear” about attention on their relationship, recalling the circus that surrounded them the first time around. “Before we kind of put [our relationship] out there and we were naïve and it got a little trampled,” she said.
This time, she said, “We both were like, ‘Wow, we’re so happy and we don’t want any of that to come into play again.’ We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids now, and we have to be very conscious of those things. We’re so protective because it is such a beautiful time for all of us.”