Surviving Hurricane Jennifer

What was your tipping point when it came to Ben Affleck, the moment you threw your hands up and said, "Enough"? Was it when he and Jennifer Lopez canceled their wedding? When he bought her a Bentley? When she fried up chicken cutlets for him on TV? When his career became secondary to their celebrity? Maybe it was the precise moment that he put his hand on her bikini-ed butt in the "Jenny From the Block" video.

Until that point, the nation feasted on the details -- his strip-club visit, the six-carat rock that he gave her. The Latina bombshell -- with her fur coats and high heels, her ex-husbands and her appetites -- and the handsome, square-jawed movie star! She's Bronx, he's Boston!

Then indigestion set in.

"Our relationship was written about so much that it just alienated people," says Affleck, who claims that he is as sick of the spectacle as you are. "I feel like a guy who is almost at the finish line. Then I'll sort of disappear for a good long time, and not be ? this person."

The pair's year-and-a-half romance ebbed in January, and now Affleck is in the awkward position of having to talk about Jersey Girl, a film that actually documents their falling in love. Affleck plays a music publicist whose wife, Lopez, dies in childbirth soon after the film begins.

Jersey Girl is no Gigli fiasco -- it focuses much more on his relationship with his young daughter and his later love interest, played by Liv Tyler, than it does on Lopez, whose face has been banished from the ads and posters. "This is my favorite thing that I've done," says Affleck, lounging in his office at his L.A. production company, which is staffed with swinging young employees who sift through tapes for the Project Greenlight cable series that he co-produces for Bravo. Affleck recently asked Jersey Girl director Kevin Smith, his longtime pal, if he was angry at him for suggesting that Smith cast Lopez as his wife. "It was more a way of saying, 'Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen.' I felt badly that the tabloid craziness would overshadow what is a really personal work."

Affleck, unlike most other actors, is tall in person (six feet three). He wears jeans, work boots and a gas-station jacket. Usually gregarious, he is incredibly closed off on this particular day. He won't make eye contact, and there are uncharacteristically long silences before he speaks.

"You caught me at the tail end of a life spent entertaining the press, and I'm a little bit weary of it, having been betrayed hundreds of times," he says. "But don't worry. I'll warm up." He looks at the floor.

OK, then. Who gets the ring? "That's a ballsy way to start," Affleck says with a brittle laugh. "There was no ring. It was a fraud perpetrated on the American public." He won't reveal the reason why the two split. "I haven't had conversations with my close friends about this relationship."

Smith has his own theory on the breakup. "I totally blame the media," he says. "It's tough to live your life under a fucking microscope, and now turn that microscope into a high-powered, shooting-into-space telescope that's constantly focused on you like a laser. I think that really played a big, big fucking part."

Affleck says that he still talks to his ex and allows that the split was mutual. "I think any relationship that ends, by definition, ends mutually," he says. He clears his throat. "Sensible people are able to recognize that. I mean, relationships are mysterious and hard to fathom, but when it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you just have to accept it gracefully."