Will Smith responds to Jada Pinkett’s confessions: ‘When you’ve been with someone half your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in’
The actress, who wed the Hollywood star 26 years ago, revealed during the promotion of her memoirs that they have been separated for seven years. The actor now admits that learning the stories explained by the actress in the book has made him wake up
On Tuesday, October 17, Jada Pinkett Smith’s memoir Worthy hits bookstores. The 52-year-old American actress’s autobiography is packed with confessions about her youth, her relationship with her parents, the mental health problems she has endured over the years and the intricacies of her marriage to actor Will Smith, as she revealed in a preview last week.
One of the most striking details that caught the attention of the couple’s followers was revealed in an interview with People magazine on the occasion of the book’s launch. Jada confessed that she has been separated for more than seven years from the man she married in 1997 and with whom she has had two children. “We’re still figuring it out. We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us,” she said in the interview, where she acknowledged that at the 2022 Oscar Awards ceremony, which made history for Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock after a joke about Jada’s alopecia, they had already been separated for more than six years.
The 55-year-old actor’s response to his wife’s revelations came this weekend through an email that the star of I Am Legend, The Pursuit of Happyness and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air sent to The New York Times. “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in,” writes Smith, who claims that Pinkett’s confessions about their marriage in her memoir made him wake up. “You can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties,” adds the Oscar winner for best actor for King Richard.
Smith says in the email, published in an article by the U.S. outlet on Saturday, that learning about the life of the woman who has officially been his wife for the past 26 years from Worthy made him realize that he had “lived a life more on the edge” and that she is more “resilient, clever and compassionate” than he’d understood. In the book, Pinkett Smith reveals things like how her parents were frequent drug users and how she herself sold drugs in her youth, and how she has struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts.
Will and Jada tied the knot on New Year’s Day 1997. A year later their first son, Jaden (now 25) was born, and in 2000 his sister Willow (22) arrived. The couple has been the talk of the town for more than two decades, particularly in the last few years, when they began to be more open to the public. In 2018, Will Smith spoke on Red Table Talk, in front of his mother-in-law, his wife, his daughter and thousands of viewers, about the point he called “the worst” moment of their marriage. “There was a period where mommy woke up and cried 45 days straight, I started keeping track,” said the actor to Willow. “I think that’s the worst I ever felt in our marriage. I was failing miserably,” he added.
That same year, the actor also revealed in an interview with Tidal that he preferred not to use the word “marriage” when talking about Jada. “We refer to ourselves as life partners, where you get into that space where you realize you are literally with somebody for the rest of your life,” he explained. There have also been some notorious extramarital affairs that both have acknowledged. “Although it was initially a monogamous relationship, it no longer is,” said the actor in an interview with GQ in 2021, when the memoirs being promoted were those of Will Smith himself.
The married pair of actors have not even lived in the same house for two years, as Pinkett has her own residence close to the marital home. “In recent years, they’ve lived separately. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she bought her own place, moving out of their Calabasas compound,” explains The New York Times in an article recounting the actor’s personal story. However, Pinkett said in her recent interview with People that their relationship is still being worked out and that she is not considering divorce. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever,” she confessed: “And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”
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