Jennifer Lopez Covers Vogue’s Shape Issue, Talks Parenting and Her ‘Soul Mate’
She may be a bombshell in red on Vogue’s latest cover, but it seems that Jennifer Lopez is and will always be our Jenny from the block.
The American Idol sweetheart (Paula who?) is a mom to two, a loving co-parent with former husband Marc Anthony, and—as she puts it—a lover, not a fighter.
“By nature I am not tough, believe it or not,” she says in her Vogue cover story, penned by Jonathan Van Meter. “No. I am a lover. And with my kids I am even softer.”
Her 4-year-old twins, Max and Emme, “do something to you where you want to do everything right for them,” she said. “And obviously no parent does everything right. It’s this weird thing that happens where you are striving to be as good as you can be so that they turn out well. And that requires that you be a really great, evolved, aware person in every moment.”
Of course, Lopez has learned recently that she has to love herself as well, and even sports a diamond band that spells out “I love me,” a gift someone gave her after her divorce from Anthony.
“That may sound conceited, but it’s not,” she said. “If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love anybody else. And I think as women we really forget that. All we want is to be happy, to feel secure, to feel understood. But you can’t look for somebody else to do that for you.”
There’s also her much buzzed-about 24-year-old boyfriend, Casper Smart (“He’s adorable … He’s a good egg,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about it too much. It’s my private thing”), but Lopez says her true love is with someone slightly less salacious: her manager, Benny Medina.
“I just think of him as a real, creative soul mate,” she said. “He’s been the most consistent man in my life besides my dad. We love each other. People always ask about all the men I dated, and I am like, ‘You know the Benny and Jennifer story? That’s the real story here.’”
The April issue is available through Vogue’s digital edition today.
