Ben Affleck impresses Jennifer Garner with changes she 'always hoped for'

Ben Affleck and his ex-wife Jennifer Garner are “closer than ever” amid his divorce with Jennifer Lopez.

“Ben and Jen are closer than ever,” a tipster told Life & Style. “They’ve developed a mutual respect and a deeper level of friendship they didn’t have before. It has some friends asking if they could be on their way to getting back together.”

Affleck married Garner in 2005 and the couple welcomed three kids Violet Anne, 19, Seraphina (Fin) Rose, 15, and Samuel, 12. The duo divorced in 2016 and have been co-parenting since.

After suffering from alcohol addiction for decades, the Gone Girl star is finally doing well, according to the tipster. He “got the help he needed, got sober, remarried and is now getting divorced again,” said the source. “He’s done a lot of work on himself, and he’s a much better man for it. It’s what Jen has always hoped for him.”

Garner “has watched him evolve. She’s seen the progress and the transformation, and it’s changed how she feels about him. It’s no secret that Ben thinks Jen was the best thing to ever happen to him.”

Affleck previously got candid about regretting his divorce with the 13 Going on 30 star and his alcohol addiction.

"I drank relatively normal for a long time. And I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. That was in 2015-2016. Alcohol, of course, created many marital problems,” he told the New York Times.

The actor continued: "The biggest regret of my life is this divorce. Shame is really toxic. There is no positive by-product of shame. It is just a toxic and hideous feeling of low self-esteem. It's not particularly healthy for me to be obsessed with failures, relapses, and hurt myself. I certainly made mistakes. I certainly did things I regret. But you need to compose yourself, learn from it, learn a little more, try to keep going ahead."

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner met on the set of Pearl Harbor in 2000. Garner played a nurse named Sandra, while Affleck played Captain Rafe McCawley. The duo’s romance began after they co-starred in Daredevil in 2003.