As we talked about yesterday, Jennifer Lopez managed to score the September cover of Vanity Fair. There were rumors that it was going to Linnocent, so I don’t know what happened there. As for Jennifer and this “exclusive”… keep in mind that Jennifer and Marc just announced their split on July 15! Yes, Us Weekly and People Magazine reportedly got the heads up on their split days before the official announcement, and yes, Jennifer already gave a back-handed “exclusive” to Us Weekly when she let her people talk freely about the problems in her marriage. Still, what immediately comes to mind is how quickly Jennifer acted to give away her “exclusive first interview” to VF. Vanity Fair had to shoot their cover and get their cover story written all by last week. Which means that Jennifer and VF basically negotiated this cover within a matter of days (if not hours) after the split announcement. E! News claims that Jennifer actually did the interview before the split announcement… which means that it’s possible that Jennifer was going to dump Marc via Vanity Fair. Anyway, I had high hopes that Jennifer would really be telling all, but she’s not really:

“This was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to face,” Lopez says in the new issue of Vanity Fair (on newstands this week). “I really wanted this family to work. That was my biggest dream, and I worked hard at it. We both did. Sometimes it doesn’t work—and that’s sad. But I remain an eternal optimist about love. I believe in love…It’s still my biggest dream. It’s still my biggest dream. I am positive—determined to move forward with my life, bring up my babies, and do the best job I can as a mother, entertainer, and person. I now look forward to new challenges. I feel strong.”

Lopez opens up to contributing editor Lisa Robinson about her life with Anthony and the example she hopes to set for her children; she talks about her relationship with P. Diddy and breaking off her engagement to Ben Affleck; she’s honest about the diva rumors that surround her, and shares her attitudes toward money, fame, and especially love.

“I’m a hopeless romantic and passionate person when it comes to love,” Lopez explains, describing the passage that has brought her to her current state of mind. “It’s not that I didn’t love myself before. Sometimes we don’t realize that we are compromising ourselves. To understand that a person is not good for you, or that that person is not treating you in the right way, or that he is not doing the right thing for himself—if I stay, then I am not doing the right thing for me. I love myself enough to walk away from that now.”

“I will always respect Marc as a singer and performer,” Lopez tells Vanity Fair. “We actually work great together, and he was always very supportive. Together we could make magic—and we did. He will always be in our lives. He will always hold a special place in my heart as the father of my children.”

“We try, we try,” she said when asked about balancing their work life, their children and their marriage. “[But] it’s getting increasingly harder. When we were [first] married, most of the time, and even before the babies were born, we were able to go everywhere together. I wasn’t working as much. So we kind of had that. I went on tour with him a few times in the first few years of our marriage, and we did a film [El Cantante] together. It’s hard, and we’re figuring it out. It’s tough. And… everything is ramping up in a way. Like I said, we had the first three years of our marriage just for us. I wasn’t working, it was mainly about him. Then we got pregnant. Then it became about the kids. And then I started working again.”

She said she and Marc fought about everything. “Marriage is tough,” she said. “It’s not going to be perfect…It’s definitely challenging.”

Love aside, Lopez also reveals she tried using nannies for twins Max and Emme, but “it wasn’t for me.” Instead, family and friends help with the kids.

The American Idol judge (official word of her return is coming any day now) insists she didn’t have fertility treatments (“Twins run in my family,” she said). She also said hasn’t had any plastic surgery. “But I don’t know how I’ll feel about it when I’m 50,” she admitted.

She also admits that she knows she’s not the best of singers. “I think I’m a really great performer,” Lopez said. “I think I’m a really great actress. I feel confident in those things—that’s a better way to say it. I’m not as gifted a vocalist as some of the girls that are out there, but I know I communicate.”

And sells a ton of records. Her eight albums and numerous hit singles have a sold a combined total of—ready for this?—55 millions copies. She will get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next year. “It’s like all that hard work and now something permanent is going to be there,” Lopez said. “I made my mark.”

[From Vanity Fair & E! News]

Hm… very interesting. In some passages, it does sound like the interview came before she announced the split, and she’s trying to communicate how their marriage has problems. I suspect that there were two interviews, one before the split announcement, and one after. Even though I think Jennifer is trying not to have her name attached to publicly bashing Marc, you can tell that she no longer gives a crap, before or after their split. She’s been over it for a long time. And I have my fingers crossed that she moves on in spectacular fashion.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.