Children grow up. Parents grow old. Summer’s warmth gives way to winter’s chill. Add to this list of sad inevitabilities the Jennifer Lopez-Ben Affleck breakup.

After months of speculation and internet chatter, on Wednesday the news broke that Ms. Lopez had officially moved to dissolve her union with Mr. Affleck — on the anniversary of their 2022 wedding ceremony at a recreation of a Georgia plantation, no less.

“She was done waiting and the date she did it speaks a ton,” a source told People Magazine.

This marriage was, of course, the second time around for Ben and Jen, who’d first been engaged in the early aughts, and who had found their way back to each other in 2021. It was a love story for the ages — or, at least, for second-chance-loving pop-culture fans of a certain age seeking pandemic-era distractions. Had romance conquered all? Or was another of JLo’s relationships destined to take a turn on Fortuna’s wheel? The reports that the couple did not sign a prenup suggest they were of the former belief. Call it the triumph of hope over lawyers.

This will be Ms. Lopez’s fourth divorce, which puts her at risk of becoming an Elizabeth Taylor for a new generation: a multitalented female celebrity who is best known not for her vast creative output nor even for her undeniable beauty and charm, but, instead, for her many marriages.

Over her eight decades, Ms. Taylor was married eight times to seven men (the discrepancy owing to her two walks down the aisle with Richard Burton). At 55, Ms. Lopez has married, in addition to Mr. Affleck, the producer Ojani Noa, the backup dancer Cris Judd and the singer Marc Anthony; she was also once engaged to the baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Which means she’s just a few Larry Fortenskys away from hitting what future historians may refer to as the Taylor line, where what gets covered is your love life, and not your life’s work.

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But there’s a big difference between JLo and La Liz.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was too young to know Ms. Taylor as the violet-eyed phenom who first dazzled in “National Velvet” and went on to be perhaps the most famous, the most glamorous movie star in the world. I was, however, just the right age to experience her as a pop culture mainstay and occasional punchline. This was Ms. Taylor’s frosted-tips-and-caftans era, when she appeared in front of a camera only to make soft-focus perfume ads, parodied by “Saturday Night Live.” It was the time of her union with Mr. Fortensky, a construction worker she’d met in rehab, and whom she married at her friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.

The news media that had once so eagerly built her up was all too happy to lavish attention on her decline, as well.

But here’s the thing. In between getting married, divorced and married again, Ms. Taylor found time to leverage her brand for an unglamorous but utterly urgent cause: She put her fame in service of people with AIDS.

She did it early, in 1985, when many still wrongly feared that H.I.V. could be transmitted through casual contact, and people with AIDS were pariahs. Some hospitals didn’t want to treat them. Some landlords didn’t want to rent to them. Some schools didn’t want to teach them. Religious conservatives called the disease God’s judgment.

And there was Elizabeth Taylor, holding fund-raisers, giving money, urging Ronald Reagan to make a speech about AIDS (a word he had for years been reluctant even to say in public), rallying Hollywood friends and lovers to the cause, even when some colleagues warned her that aligning herself with such a reviled disease and the strident activism that was associated with it could end her career.

Who cares about careers, she demanded, “when the people, without whom we wouldn’t have a career, are dying?”

“I resented my fame,” her biographer, Kate Andersen Brower, has quoted her as saying, “until I realized I could use it.” She used it, and changed the world.

Jennifer Lopez could do it, too.

Unlike Ms. Taylor, who’d retired from movies in her latter decades, Ms. Lopez is still a fantastically successful entertainer. This has not been her best year — there was a much-mocked, self-financed multimedia project, a hastily canceled world tour, and a spate of think pieces about where it all went wrong and why social media had turned on her. But let’s not forget that in 2023 Ms. Lopez starred in top-streaming movies on two separate platforms. In 2020 she performed at the Super Bowl, and in 2021 she performed at the Biden inauguration. Even during this, her annus horribilis, she found time to serve as a co-chair of the Met Gala, where she appeared in a stunning Schiaparelli gown. She’s got beauty and charisma for days, work ethic for weeks.

“Here’s an entertainer determined to enter-freaking-tain,” Wesley Morris wrote, in his review of “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.” “Her sort of generosity shouldn’t be taken for granted.”

With that generosity, she could be fighting the good fight on behalf of any number of worthy endeavors and making a tremendous impact. But so far, her most celebrated victories are those against Mother Nature and Father Time.

Read enough about Ms. Lopez and two things are quickly evident: She wants to control her own narrative, and she yearns for love and affirmation. “In Jennifer’s case, I don’t think there’s enough followers, or — or movies or records,” Ben Affleck says in the behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Ms. Lopez’s latest album, “to still that part of you that still feels a longing and a pain. Ultimately that’s the work that you got to do on your own.”

“When I was a girl they’d ask me what I’d be/A woman in love is what I grew up wanting to be/It’s my melody/The symphony I sing,” Ms. Lopez sings in the “This is Me … Now” title track. “True love does exist, and some things are forever,” she told USA Today. “ Please don’t give up on that because that’s all that matters in life … love.”

Ms. Lopez is hardly the only woman who wants to fall in love (and to look amazing while she’s doing it). But she is one of a very few who can also command the attention of millions of fans, whose voice can draw attention to the plight or oppressed group of her choosing, whose words could change the world.

I wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to tell Ms. Lopez which cause to embrace, nor to trot out the hoary old advice about how you’ll fall in love not when you’re looking, but when you are pursuing your passions, living your best life. She’s a queen — and she’s already pursuing her passions and living her best life. I hope she gets her heart’s desire.

Meanwhile, I hope she knows that the kind of cultural capital she wields can be a tremendous force, reaching far beyond the bounds of the movie theaters and the tabloids and the satellite-radio broadcasts. If JLo is going to be our generation’s Elizabeth Taylor, I hope she’ll lean into the best, most empowering parts of that story — Ms. Taylor as world-changer, speaking truth to power, not Ms. Taylor as the eternal bride.