Jennifer Lopez on 2004 split from Ben Affleck

'It felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest'

She may sing “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” but Jennifer Lopez’s romances have left her paying the price in heartache.

In her new memoir, the thrice-married Lopez opens up about her “tumultuous, passionate, and explosive” marriage to singer Marc Anthony, whom she hooked up with while on the rebound from her “first real heartbreak” — Ben Affleck.

The Bronx-born J.Lo, 45, and the “Gone Girl” actor began dating in 2002, after they filmed the flop “Gigli,” but split days before they were to get married in 2004.

“I really felt like I had found somebody great and he had found somebody great and we thought we could make it work,” she told “Today” show host Hoda Kotb at the event at the 92nd Street Y, as about 1,000 attendees looked on.

In the book, titled “True Love,” Lopez writes that “it felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest” after her split with Affleck. “And when the realization that I wasn’t going to have the fairy tale family I wanted really set in, well, that was when I really started to fall apart.”

 

Instead of turning to drugs or drink to dull the pain, she wrote that she “sought out comfort in another person, tried to find someone who could make me feel loved and wanted in my loneliest hour.”

Anthony became her love interest six years after they first met and he had predicted, “One day you’re going to be my wife.”

Five months after her breakup with Affleck, J.Lo became Anthony’s bride. By February 2008, they welcomed twins, Emme and Max, and it seemed “Jenny from the Block” finally had the family of her dreams. But it ended in a 2011 divorce, and Anthony announced this week that he’s marrying model Shannon De Lima, 26.

“I’m happy for him,” Lopez said at the 92nd Street Y appearance.

As for her love life, she said, “I am totally single.”

She said she is in therapy, and working to get herself ready for the right person. “It’s not going to be forever,” she said of being single. “Someone great will come along.”

With Bill Hutchinson