Will and Jada Pinkett Smith tackle 'historical rumors' about their marriage: Divorce, Scientology, and whether they're swingers
Will and Jada Pinkett Smith just keep the marriage confessions coming.
The 50-year-old actor joined his wife on her Facebook show, Red Table Talk, for part two of the episode “Our Unique Union.” The couple, who have been together nearly 25 years, got extremely candid about their relationship in front of their daughter, Willow Smith, 17, and Jada’s mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones. The two discussed hitting rock bottom in their marriage about seven years ago.
“I think the turning point in our relationship for me happened when I turned 40,” Pinkett Smith, now 47, said of her milestone 2011 birthday.
“Yeah, your 40th birthday was my low point,” Smith agreed, before recalling how he threw her an elaborate celebration when she wanted something more intimate.
“She told me that the party was the most ridiculous display of my ego,” he revealed. “Crushed. To this day, I know I was crushed because it was true. It wasn’t a party for her. When she called me on that, that’s when I snapped … I snapped in front of Willow.”
The celebration brought their marital issues to the forefront of their relationship. “There was so much that wasn’t me that I was living, so much inauthenticity,” Pinkett Smith said.
“I was much more conscious of public perception than Jada,” Smith admitted. “That was a difficult one for me, when you stopped clapping when I did things in the exterior world that were great. … I realized [Jada] didn’t want none of the stuff I had built. The house was too big, there were always too many people here, she didn’t want to travel the way we traveled, she didn’t want all of her kids to be getting trolled on Twitter. She didn’t want any of that.”
“And that’s why I stopped clapping, and it was a decline from there,” Pinkett Smith said.
“To have to let go of the picture, to have to let go of the dream was devastating. We essentially had to destroy our marriage,” Smith revealed. “She was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ and to me, it was over, but divorce was never even an option. … I was reading in the tabloids we were getting divorced and all of that stuff, and it was like it was never even a consideration. Because I had been divorced before, I wasn’t getting divorced again. There was a time when I was scared that she might [want a divorce].”
“It never crossed my mind. … I put in too much, period. What is most important to me is my family,” Pinkett Smith said. “I knew that divorce wasn’t necessary. Why do that?” The Girls Trip star said she knew they would always be under the same roof — even if that meant they were living in opposite ends of the house with different partners.
“But I don’t want to leave this table making people feel like divorce is wrong,” she clarified, saying that divorce simply wasn’t the right resolution for them. “We just needed to get to an agreement between he and I.”
“I was devastated even worse than a divorce,” Smith remembered of their rough patch. “We broke up within our marriage and got back together again. And had to rebuild with new rules and something way completely different.”
“Something way different,” Pinkett Smith agreed. “You have to go your separate ways and get out of each other’s way to really see yourself. So, I had to go away, gain my strength as Jada again — not Mommy, not wife.”
Smith said that he too needed to work on himself. “I took off for two years. I’ve worked on myself; I’ve read 50 books on marriage and relationships and behavioral psychology,” he explained. “I was not going to fail in this marriage. Right? But, I shut down for two entire years to see what was I doing wrong.”
After Men in Black 3 in 2012, Smith didn’t star in another film until 2015’s Concussion as the couple battled through their issues.
“It takes a lot of beating up on each other,” Pinkett Smith said. “Because really what you’re breaking down is all the fantasies.”
“What happened was our ‘characters’ were trying to have a relationship,” Smith noted. “Will Smith is a character, but deep down inside I was an insecure little boy that wanted Jada to say I was great. If she didn’t say I was great, the dragon came out.”
“For me personally, I had a lot of emotional maturing to do,” Pinkett Smith added. “We expect people to love us more than we love ourselves. … I definitely went through that with Will. I thought it was his job to make me feel a certain way.”
Smith recalled, “In 2012 I had built everything I had ever dreamed about. As a little boy I saw this family, I saw this life, I’ve been building this —”
“And I was like no, no, no,” Pinkett Smith chimed in. “What’s important is how we’re connecting internally. How we’re relating. These are the things we had to break, come to new understanding, and re-create. Will and I have decided to even throw away the concept of marriage.”
“We don’t even call ourselves married anymore,” he said.
“It’s a life partnership in the sense that we’ve created a foundation together that we know is for this lifetime,” Pinkett Smith explained.
“Whatever she needs, she can count on me for the rest of her life,” Smith said. “There’s nothing that could happen that we won’t be together and love each other.”
Their hard work really paid off. “The last year has been amazing,” she declared. Before the end of the episode, the couple also took the time to clear up some “historical rumors.”
“We’ve never been Scientologists,” Smith stated. “We’ve never been swingers.” He brought the conversation back home to the topic of divorce.
“You know why I never got divorced?” he asked.
“It’s cheaper to keep me,” Pinkett Smith quipped.
“’Cause I’ve never met anyone like you, and I knew if I wasn’t with you, I’d be searching in vain for the rest of my life,” he replied.
And there you have it.
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