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      As Lopez Files for Divorce From Affleck, Should You Reunite With an Ex-Partner?

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      As Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck show, rekindling an old romance is risky. We asked couples counselors what you should ask before diving back in.When the superstars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck married in 2022, decades after calling off their initial engagement, it seemed like the stuff of a romantic Hollywood blockbuster.“Love is beautiful,” Ms. Lopez wrote after the couple’s Las Vegas nuptials. “Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”But Ms. Lopez filed for divorce from Mr. Affleck on Tuesday after two years of marriage, ending months of frenzied media speculation about their shaky union, and highlighting a decidedly unromantic truth: Reuniting with an ex-partner does not guarantee a happy ending.“I have certainly seen people who are in long-term happy relationships who got back together after having broken up,” said Elizabeth Earnshaw, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Philadelphia. “I would say that is the exception to the rule.”Many couples counselors said they recommended taking an almost clinical approach to reuniting with an ex — even (or especially) if you are swept up in the thrill of rediscovering old passions. Here are four questions therapists recommend asking.1. Do we both understand why we broke up?That is a “laughably obvious” question to start with, admitted Lisa Marie Bobby, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Denver and the founder of Growing Self, a counseling and coaching service. But if you and your partner cannot both articulate a clear answer without defensiveness or tension, that is a red flag, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘Online Dating After 50 Can Be Miserable. But It’s Also Liberating.’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeWhen Maggie Jones’s marriage collapsed after 23 years, she was devastated and overwhelmed. She was in her 50s, with two jobs, two teenage daughters and one dog. She didn’t consider dating. She had no time, no emotional energy. But then a year passed. One daughter was off at college, the other increasingly independent. After several more months went by, she started to feel a sliver of curiosity about what kind of men were out there and how it would feel to date again. The last time she dated was 25 years ago, and even then, she fell into relationships mostly with guys from high school, college, parties, work. Now every man she knew was either married, too young, too old or otherwise not a good fit.That meant online dating — the default mode not just for the young but also for people Ms. Jones’s age. Her only exposure had been watching her oldest daughter, home from college one summer, as she sat on her bed rapidly swiping through guy after guy — spending no more than a second or two on each.Ms. Jones tells her story of online dating in later adulthood, and what she learned.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      How to Avoid a Drawn-Out Divorce

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      The sticking points in a breakup aren’t the same for every couple, but lawyers who have brokered countless divorces have some advice for keeping things simple.Ask any divorce lawyer: The only people who control how long a divorce takes are the two parties going through the divorce.Although many divorces are finalized through mediation, a process in which lawyers try to broker a resolution without having to go to court, those negotiations can sometimes take years, prolonged by things like child custody battles, when emotions can be expected to run high. Perhaps less explicable is when the holdup arises over the splitting of assets like homes, vintage cars or art collections.About six years after they were declared legally single, the formerly married actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt continue to be legally entangled. The reason: a French vineyard they bought while together; Mr. Pitt is suing Ms. Jolie for having sold her stake in the property without his consent, according to reports by Us Weekly and People. Ms. Jolie is asking him to drop the suit so the family can heal.Although your average split isn’t likely to be held up by a fight over a winery, many couples find that certain jointly held assets can be sticking points in the event of a breakup or divorce. So what precautions — if any — are couples taking to avoid a bruising battle after they’ve decided to part ways?Alan Feigenbaum, a divorce lawyer in New York City, has seen divorce proceedings drag out over the division of valuable art collections. But things can become absurd, he said, when negotiations are dragged out over property that isn’t even particularly valuable.“Some of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen,” he added, “is arguing over who gets to keep their children’s toys.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tinder’s C.M.O. Moonlights as a Matchmaker

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      Melissa Hobley believes in the power of dating apps, but she’s been moonlighting as an old-fashioned matchmaker for over a decade.It might seem odd that Melissa Hobley is a real-life matchmaker who is working with 50 to 100 singles around the globe at any given time.She has, after all, spent much of the last decade working for dating apps whose goal, presumably, is for singles to connect through their phones. She is the chief marketing officer of Tinder, a position she’s held since August 2022. Before that she worked for OkCupid for over five years.It’s not that Ms. Hobley believes that dating apps are dead or even dying, though some statistics show troubles. Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder, OKCupid, Hinge and Match.com, among other brands, have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021 as they struggle to attract young people to pay for the more expensive features.Ms. Hobley pointed to Tinder’s great success: It has 50 million users in 190 countries, she said. “Every three seconds a relationship starts on Tinder, which is actually crazy.” (This credence is rooted in a study Match Group did in 2023 that defined “relationship” as anything lasting more than three months.) But Ms. Hobley, 44, who splits her time between New York City and the North Fork of Long Island with her husband and two daughters, believes there are many ways for people to mingle. She wants to be involved in all of them.For Ms. Hobley, in-person matchmaking is a “hobby or a passion,” she said, not something she has “ever been paid to do.” Sometimes singles will reach out to her via email or social media asking for help. Other times she strikes up conversations with strangers while out and about. “I will just meet someone at an event or in line for a coffee shop or that amazing doughnut place in Sag Harbor, and we will start talking,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘You’re great. Let’s help you find someone as perfect as you.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are Running Clubs an Alternative to Dating Apps?

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      Inspired by one thirsty TikTok video after another, users are hoping to find their next romantic encounter at the finish line. Here’s what you should know before dating a runner.Cindy Sandjo, a 29-year-old content creator who works in I.T. and lives in Dallas, was initially interested in joining a running club because she was in search of other Black people she could connect with.She joined her first run at the end of May and immediately began posting videos about her newfound interest on social media. She was quickly informed by her followers that running clubs “are the new dating apps.”“I joined for the running and also for the community, just to find people that have similar interests as me,” she said. “But I stayed because, yeah, it’s an opportunity for me to find a husband.”A recent flurry of videos on TikTok and Instagram suggests that running clubs, in addition to being a great way to improve one’s health and train with other like-minded individuals, are also the new way to date. Why chase potential lovers online when they may be waiting for you at the finish line?After about a week of training with Run It Up, a Dallas running club, Ms. Sandjo was stopped during a run by another participant who said he had seen her Instagram. It was a Saturday, and they struck up conversation, exchanged contact information and messaged each other before meeting up the next day to run together.“I told him, ‘I’m just starting to run, so I’m sorry if I slow you down,’” she recalled. “And he was like, ‘No no no, it’s going to be my off day, so I’ll match your pace.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hallie Biden Is a Key Witness in Hunter Biden Gun Trial

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      Hallie Biden, Mr. Biden’s ex-girlfriend and the widow of his brother, Beau, described his self-destructive behavior around the time he applied for a gun in 2018.Hallie Biden, a former girlfriend of Hunter Biden and widow of his brother, Beau, took the stand on Thursday, telling jurors that she saw him buy, stash and smoke vast amounts of crack cocaine in the fall of 2018 when he claimed to be drug-free on a firearms application.Ms. Biden — speaking in nervous, clipped bursts as she faced Mr. Biden across the fourth-floor courtroom — admitted that he had introduced her to crack in the summer of 2018. She said she was ashamed and embarrassed by their behavior when the two briefly lived together in a rented house in Annapolis, Md., a time when both were in shock over Beau Biden’s death.“It was a terrible experience that I went through,” she said.Ms. Biden is, by far, the most important witness for the prosecution, offering the most detailed, and intimate, portrait of Mr. Biden’s reckless and self-destructive behavior at the time.Mr. Biden, she said, bought multiple rocks of crack in Washington, where he kept an apartment — some the size of “Ping-Pong balls, or bigger maybe” — and stored them in his “backpack or car.”Ms. Biden said she discovered the gun at the center of the case when she was rifling through Mr. Biden’s vehicle the morning after he showed up at her house. It was part of a “pattern” of erratic behavior, she added, saying he would be unreachable for weeks at a time and she or her children would scrounge through his car for drugs or alcohol to help him “start anew and deal with stuff” when he reappeared exhausted at her home.When she searched the car on Oct. 23, she described noticing “a dusting of powder” that she assumed to be “remnants of crack cocaine” before finding the gun in a case with a broken lock. Flustered, she said she improvised a way to dispose of it at a grocery store nearby.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Loneliness Is a Problem That A.I. Won’t Solve

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      When I was reporting my ed tech series, I stumbled on one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in years about how technology might interfere with human connection: an article on the website of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz cheerfully headlined “It’s Not a Computer, It’s a Companion!”It opens with this quote from someone who has apparently fully embraced the idea of having a chatbot for a significant other: “The great thing about A.I. is that it is constantly evolving. One day it will be better than a real [girlfriend]. One day, the real one will be the inferior choice.” The article goes on to breathlessly outline use cases for “A.I. companions,” suggesting that some future iteration of chatbots could stand in for mental health professionals, relationship coaches or chatty co-workers.This week, OpenAI released an update to its ChatGPT chatbot, an indication that the inhuman future foretold by the Andreessen Horowitz story is fast approaching. According to The Washington Post, “The new model, called GPT-4o (“o” stands for “omni”), can interpret user instructions delivered via text, audio and image — and respond in all three modes as well.” GPT-4o is meant to encourage people to speak to it rather than type into it, The Post reports, as “The updated voice can mimic a wider range of human emotions, and allows the user to interrupt. It chatted with users with fewer delays, and identified an OpenAI executive’s emotion based on a video chat where he was grinning.”There have been lots of comparisons between GPT-4o and the 2013 movie “Her,” in which a man falls in love with his A.I. assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. While some observers, including the Times Opinion contributing writer Julia Angwin, who called ChatGPT’s recent update “rather routine,” weren’t particularly impressed, there’s been plenty of hype about the potential for humanlike chatbots to ameliorate emotional challenges, particularly loneliness and social isolation.For example, in January, the co-founder of one A.I. company argued that the technology could improve quality of life for isolated older people, writing, “Companionship can be provided in the form of virtual assistants or chatbots, and these companions can engage in conversations, play games or provide information, helping to alleviate feelings of loneliness and boredom.”Certainly, there are valuable and beneficial uses for A.I. chatbots — they can be life-changing for people who are visually impaired, for example. But the notion that bots will one day be an adequate substitute for human contact misunderstands what loneliness really is, and doesn’t account for the necessity of human touch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Spouses Discuss Co-Parenting and Being the Best of Friends

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      “We genuinely like each other,” Alex Yaroslavsky said of his ex-wife and co-parent, Liza Cooper. They even live in the same apartment building.In Unhitched, couples tell the stories of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward.Liza Cooper and Alex Yaroslavsky, both from New York City, met in their late 30s, in March 2007, through a dating app; they married about a year later. Both secular Jews, the two seemed compatible on paper, yet differences in their communication styles sometimes created conflict and ultimately brought an end to their marriage.But with patience, work and a sympathetic landlord, the two managed to become dear friends and co-parents after their divorce. They now live on different floors of the same Upper West Side apartment building.Dates of marriage June 15, 2008 to Dec. 13, 2018Age when married Ms. Cooper was 37; Mr. Yaroslavsky was 38. (They are now 53 and 54.)Current occupations She is an administrator in a hospital and a dating coach; he is an executive coach with his own company.Children One son, age 14.Where did they grow up? In 1980, Mr. Yaroslavsky, an only child, immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 10. The family had lived in Lviv, which was then part of the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine. He quickly learned English.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More