Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck shocked their millions of fans two months ago when they rekindled their romance seventeen years after they called off their engagement. In a new interview this week, Affleck’s best friend Matt Damon revealed the one major difference between the couple’s rekindled romance and the one they had nearly two decades ago.

“I have to say, the press was particularly terrible to them, like, 18 years ago,” Damon revealed, according to Entertainment Tonight.

“What’s nice is that at least they’re being nice this time around,” he added jokingly. “They’re on vacation right now, but he still responded when I hit him up about the Red Sox yesterday…You still have priorities!”

Back in January, months before they rekindled their romance, Affleck recalled how “mean” people were when they first started dating back in 2001.

“People were so f**king mean about her — sexist, racist, ugly, vicious s**t was written about her in ways that if you wrote it now you would literally be fired for saying those things you said,” he said on while appearing on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. ”

“Now it’s like, she’s lionized and respected for the work she did, where she came from, what she accomplished — as well she f**king should be!” Affleck added. “I would say you have a better shot, coming from the Bronx, of ending up as like [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor on the Supreme Court than you do of having Jennifer Lopez’s career and being who she is at 50 years old today.”

Damon also recently talked about collaborating with Affleck again on their upcoming movie The Last Duel following the success of their 1997 Academy Award-winning movie Good Will Hunting.

“I think that writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient because we didn’t really understand structure… But this time around, it’s a story about perspective,” Damon said.

“… Making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster,” he added. “I think we’ll write a lot more in the future just because it didn’t turn out to be as time consuming as we thought. It was actually a lot of fun.”