Jada Pinkett still doesn't 'know' Will Smith 23 years into marriage, says they're just learning to be friends
Jada Pinkett Smith has candidly spoken up about her marriage with Will Smith as the pair quarantines amid the COVID-19 lockdown. During Wednesday’s, April 29, Facebook Watch episode of ‘Red Table Talk’, Jada shared how the quarantine has impacted her marriage to the ‘Bad Boys for Life’ star.
Along with the 48-year-old, the show was co-hosted by her 19-year-old daughter Willow and mother Adrienne Banfield Norris, where they talked to pastor John Gray and his wife Aventer about the effects of the pandemic on their relationship. During the discussion, Jada also talked about her marriage with Will.
She said: “I gotta be honest. I think one of the things that I’ve realized is that I don’t know Will at all.” When asked by her mother to elaborate on it, the ‘Angel Has Fallen’ star explained, “I feel like there’s a layer that you get to, life gets busy and you create these stories in your head and then you hold onto these stories and that is your idea of your partner, that’s not who your partner is."
Jada and Will are married for 23 years. They tied the knot in December 1997 and share two children, son Jaden, and daughter Willow.
Revealing further, Jada said that she is now "going through the process of having to dissolve all of those stories and all the ideas of Will" that she had built in her mind to truly understand her husband of over two decades.
“This is intimacy. Just being able to get to who our loved ones are beyond that which we have perceived,” ‘The Nutty Professor’ star noted.
The singer also shared that she and Will are now working together to get to know more about each other and are trying to build a friendship.
“The thing that Will and I are learning to do is be friends. You get into all these ideas of what intimate relationships are supposed to look like, what marriages are supposed to be,” Jada mentioned.
“Will and I are in the process of him taking the time to learn to love himself, me taking the time to learn to love myself and us building a friendship along the way," she added.
Not only this, but Jada also accepted the reality of marriage and admitted that it can be easy to become distant from a married partner.
“Let me tell you, that’s been something to be married to somebody 20-some odd years and realize I don’t know you and you don't know me and also realizing there’s an aspect of yourself you don't know either," she said.
However, this was not the first time when Jada opened up about her relationship with Will. In August 2019, she appeared on CBS' ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ and shared that she and her husband talk openly about their marriage because they want people to know they do not have a perfect one.
“[It] was really to kind of get rid of the idea that people in the public eye have perfect relationships. We were kind of sick of living up to that. We were real sick of it,” the ‘Set It Off’ star said at the time.