In an interview with The New York Times, Ben Affleck said his divorce from Jennifer Garner was his biggest regret.
Affleck and Garner began dating in 2004 and married a year later, in 2005, only for the couple to announce their separation in 2015. The divorce was finalized three years later, in 2018, the couple's official end after 14 years of marriage.
Affleck said that while it was not healthy for him to obsess over his failures or relapses and beat himself up, he had "certainly made mistakes."
"I have certainly done things that I regret," he said. "But you've got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward."
Affleck, who has long battled alcoholism, had a relapse last year when he was pictured inebriated in West Hollywood, California, after a publicly disclosed year of sobriety. Affleck acknowledged his addiction had an adverse effect on his marriage to Garner and said he only drank more when the cracks in his marriage began to show.
"I drank relatively normally for a long time," Affleck said. "What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems."
Affleck said he was a person "with compulsive behavior" and believed he had a "kind of basic discomfort all the time" that he was consistently trying to get rid of, which is why he turned to alcohol.
"You're trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse," Affleck said.
"Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can't break. That's at least what happened to me."
