After a week of slow-drip bombshell revelations about her relationship with Will Smith while promoting her upcoming memoir, Worthy, Jada Pinkett Smith told The Today Show on Monday morning (Oct. 16) that the couple are working to reconcile and rebuild their fractured marriage.
“There’s no finding another great love, and I think that’s the point,” Pinkett Smith said. “It’s like we are in a place now that we are in a deep, healing space. And we are really concentrating on healing the relationship between us.”
The update came after Pinkett Smith revealed last week that the two have been living “separate lives” for the past seven years — while presenting a unified front in public — and that though they are not legally divorced they have not been together for many years.
“There’s no divorce on paper. We really have been working hard. That’s the whole thing. We are working very hard at bringing our relationship together. Back to a life partnership,” Pinkett Smith told Today co-host Hoda Kotb. “Here’s the thing about husband-wife marriage for me, for my healing process,” she said. “I came into that with very specific ideas that were blocks to me seeing Will as who he is. He can’t be this perfect, ideal guy husband. I have to be able to accept him for the human that he is, he accepts me for the human that I am. And we want to love each other there.”
In a New York Times interview, Pinkett Smith said one of the other things that shocked her about her estranged husband’s attack on Chris Rock at last years Academy Awards was when Smith shouted “Keep my wife’s name out of your f–king mouth!” after violently slapping the comedian across the face after he made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s bald hairstyle; the actress suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
“Even though we hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time, I said, ‘I’m his wife now. We in this.’ That’s just who I am,” Pinkett Smith told the paper: “That’s the gift I have to offer, like, ‘Hey, I’m riding with you.’” Though not divorced, not in an open relationship or polyamorous, Pinkett Smith said she and Will are in an agreement they refer to as a “relationship of transparency.”
Will Smith told the Times in an email statement that Jada’s memoir “kind of woke him up,” adding that, “when you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
The 52-year-old actress/singer also told the Times that as a 50th birthday present to herself she bought her own place in Calabasas, where the couple also shared a home together; the book reveals that the Smiths have been separated since 2017.
In speaking to Kotb last week for a prime-time special, Pinkett Smith described the breakdown of the relationship. “I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” she said. “I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
Jada and Will were married in 1997, with son Jaden born a year later, followed by daughter Willow in 2000.
