A Timeline Of Jennifer Lopez's Husbands And Boyfriends Explained

Jennifer Lopez is a star multiple times over. The "In Living Color" alum earned notices for her acting and became one of Hollywood's biggest draws in movies like "Selena," "Out of Sight," "The Wedding Planner," "Maid in Manhattan," and "Hustlers." Then Lopez proved herself a formidable musician, embarking on a career as a pop singer and hitmaker behind hits like "If You Had My Love," "Jenny from the Block," and "I'm Real."

During her quick ascension to mega-stardom — and continued renown, fortune, and influence after she got famous — Lopez has always lived her life out loud, and in the public eye. Since the 1990s, she's enthralled a public that wants to know every last tantalizing detail of her personal life. She's engaged in a number of high-profile relationships, from hometown loves to multiple marriages to famous boyfriends to former fiancés to rumored romances. Here's a full accounting of the loves of Jennifer Lopez, from her first major roles up to the present.

As Jennifer Lopez's star was on the rise, she connected with a waiter named Ojani Noa. According to The Mirror, they met at the high-end Miami restaurant (owned by pop superstar Gloria Estefan) where he was working. Lopez and Noa married in February 1997 (right around the time Lopez would ascend to the A-list with "Selena"), but it wouldn't last. In January 1998, the romance was over and the pair entered divorce proceedings.

The relationship was short-lived, but Noa apparently had a lot to say about his ex-wife. According to the AP (via East Bay Times), he allegedly planned to publish a tell-all book, but Lopez asked for and received a court order in 2007 preventing the project (which would have purportedly revealed explicit details about Lopez's sexual proclivities and some alleged extramarital affairs) from going forth. The book would have violated another settlement with Noa in which he agreed to never publicly disclose private details about their marriage, and in September 2007, a judge ruled that Noa pay Lopez $545,000, according to 19 News. Things got messy again when, as The Hollywood Reporter noted, Lopez "was sued for allegedly interfering with a film that would have told the story of her doomed marriage to Ojani Noa." In 2012, the suit was dismissed.

"Love Don't Cost a Thing," the first single off Jennifer Lopez's second album "J.Lo," was a huge hit in 2000. The accompanying music video, which featured a scantily clad Lopez frolicking on a beach, earned the singer two MTV Video Music Awards nominations and it also brought her to her second husband. Cris Judd performed as one of Lopez's half-dozen tank top-clad male backup dancers in the clip, and the set of the video marked the jumping off point for their relationship, according to Hola! Less than a year later, in late September 2001, according to People, Lopez and Judd got married in a lavish, nondenominational ceremony in which the celebrant was Lopez's personal attorney.

Diamonds may be forever, but the marriage was not. According to People, Judd and Lopez separated nine months later. And in July 2002, the couple filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Judd continued to work as a dancer and choreographer, and he won his season of the reality show "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!"

By 2004, Jennifer Lopez was at the top of the Latin pop movement, a style helped along by pioneers like Marc Anthony, the bestselling artist ever in the subgenre of Spanish-language romantic salsa, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. (He also had a couple of Latin pop-era smashes with "I Need to Know" and "You Sang to Me.") One musical superstar deserves another, it would seem. Per MTV News, the two met in 1998, backstage at Anthony's Broadway musical "The Capeman." They were just friends at first, and contributed to each other's projects — Lopez in Anthony's video "Contra La Corriente" and Anthony guesting on Lopez's 1999 track "No Me Ames." They dated briefly, but ultimately married other people: Lopez to Cris Judd, Anthony to Miss Universe Dayanara Torres. When both found themselves single by the end of 2003, they reconnected romantically. As MTV News noted, Anthony married Lopez in a small ceremony days after his divorce was official.

Then they were inseparable, professionally and personally. They performed at the Grammys together, recorded songs together, toured together, attended Barack Obama's presidential inauguration together, starred on American Idol together, and had some kids together — twins Emme Maribel and Maximillian David, in 2008. And three years after that, the couple announced that they would be ending their marriage.

Professional dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy has ascended to some of the highest positions available in his field: He's performed in Broadway productions, served as a partner for numerous famous women over the course of a decade on "Dancing with the Stars," and he danced backup for Jennifer Lopez. And in 2014, there were rumblings that something might've been brewing between the two. After Lopez tweeted that she wasn't seeing anyone in June of that year, a source told Us Weekly they spotted Lopez and Chmerkovskiy apparently being "very flirty with each other" at a club. Naturally, gums started flapping. 

According to the New York Daily News, Chmerkovskiy and Lopez reportedly had a "dalliance," and a source told E! News that they were "talking a lot and she thinks he is great, but she is being very careful." 

Whatever did or did not happen, it sounds like all is well. As Chmerkovskiy said in the aforementioned New York Daily News story, "With the Jennifer thing, look, we're friends. This is it. This is where it ends, pretty much." He also noted that trying to have a relationship in the limelight is "difficult" due to "all these interferences" that come along with it. And when People asked him about Lopez later that year, he said, "Yes, she's great, I have fun. And while other names are out there ... I am not a scumbag."

Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez crossed paths for the first time in Queens, New York, in 2005 at Shea Stadium. She was with then-husband Marc Anthony and told Sports Illustrated, "We shook hands, and it was this weird electricity for, like, three seconds... Three to five seconds of looking at somebody right in their eyes, and getting stuck."

It wasn't until 2017 that they got the chance to reconnect. Lopez told Ellen DeGeneres that they ran into each other at a California restaurant. "It's very simple. I was having lunch somewhere and I saw him as he passed by," Lopez explained, according to ET. "Afterwards I went outside and for some reason I felt like tapping him on the shoulder." There wasn't as much fanfare as we all would have liked. "He texted me, said, 'Let's go out to dinner,' and I said, 'OK,'" Lopez added. "We had a nice dinner." When DeGeneres teasingly asked if they went home together, Lopez replied, "Mama don't sleep over on the first date."

Things continued to blossom for the couple but J.Lo told Harper's Bazaar in 2018 that she wasn't in a rush to get married. Sure enough though, in March 2019, the duo became engaged in the Bahamas. Despite this apparent perfection, they broke up in March 2021 after some tension around possible infidelity on Rodriguez's part.