Built to make it! Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s 20-plus years of marriage have outlasted many Hollywood relationships. The couple seem as though they have figured out the magic formula to keeping the spark alive — even if they had to address rumors throughout their decades together.
The actor met the Red Table Talk cohost when she auditioned to play his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Pinkett Smith did not get the role — Nia Long ended up playing the part — but the two later struck up a romantic relationship.
Smith and Pinkett Smith tied the knot in December 1997. They went on to welcome son Jaden in July 1998 and daughter Willow in October 2000.
Prior to his marriage to the actress, the Bad Boys for Life star wed Sheree Zampino in May 1992. The pair’s son, Trey, arrived in November 1992. Smith and the Hollywood Exes alum divorced in 1995.
“Divorce was the worst thing in my adult life,” Smith admitted during a June 2020 episode of Red Table Talk. “Divorce was the ultimate failure for me. I’ve been hurt a lot in my adult life, but I don’t think anything touches the failure of getting divorced from my 2-year-old son’s mother.”
The Oscar nominee’s split from Zampino seemingly informed his approach to marriage with Pinkett Smith, as they have repeatedly made clear divorce has never been an option for them.
Meanwhile, the Maryland native addressed how important self-love is in a relationship too. “Without personal power/self love [sic], there is no foundation to build love for someone else because it’s the power needed to dissolve the ego which is our greatest obstacle to truly loving anyone,” she wrote on Instagram in February 2019. “Without self love [sic], all one has is their ego which gives a false sense of personal power through its brutal and unkind nature. The ego will never fail to strangle the love out of one’s heart if we allow it to take center stage in our relationships.”
She continued: “Transferring our trust to our hearts from our egos is a painful process in learning HOW to love. BUT … through it all … when we finally get to the place where we can give and receive love in its most pure state … ego free … it is only ever … beauty.”
Scroll through to see what Smith and Pinkett Smith have said about their marriage through the years.
After a tabloid reported that the A-list couple were secretly separated after almost 14 years of marriage, the pair told Us Weekly in a joint statement in August 2011, ”Although we are reluctant to respond to these types of press reports, the rumors circulating about our relationship are completely false. We are still together, and our marriage is intact.”
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The Girl’s Trip actress addressed the long-running rumors that she and her husband had an open marriage by making a controversial comment during an interview with HuffPost Live in April 2013 that confused the masses even more: "I think that people get that idea because Will and I are very relaxed with one another. But I've always told Will: ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be OK.’”
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After Pinkett Smith’s choice of words only fueled speculation that the Smiths had an open marriage, she attempted to clarify her comments in a lengthy Facebook post later that month. "Here is how I will change my statement…Will and I BOTH can do WHATEVER we want, because we TRUST each other to do so," she wrote. “This does NOT mean we have an open relationship…this means we have a GROWN one."
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The Gotham actress reiterated her commitment to her husband in June 2013, saying that there is nothing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air star could do to make her not love or abandon him — except, she explained, “If he did something bad to the kids — now we've got a problem."
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The rumor mill went into overdrive in August 2015, after false reports claimed that the Smiths were splitting up after 17 years of marriage. The “Summertime” rapper felt compelled to address them on Facebook in August 2015: "Under normal circumstances, I don't usually respond to foolishness (Because it's contagious). But, so many people have extended me their 'deepest condolences' that I figured – 'What the hell… I can be foolish, too!’ So, in the interest of redundant, repetitious, over & over-again-ness… Jada and I are… NOT GETTING A DIVORCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!" He concluded his statement by promising his fans that if he was to ever divorce his “Queen,” they would find out from him directly and not through the media. The Red Table Talk host later tweeted, “My King has spoken.”
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Two months later, the Bad Boys actor spoke candidly in a November 2015 interview with Entertainment Tonight about his relationship, revealing that “marriage was the most difficult, grueling, excruciating thing that we have ever taken on in our lives. And you know we’re just not quitters.” He also offered a piece of advice: “If there is a secret I would say it is that we never went into working on our relationship. We only ever worked on ourselves individually — and then presented ourselves to one another better than we were previously.”
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The Set It Off actress appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen in July 2017, where she addressed rumors that she and the Focus star were swingers. “The craziest rumor? That Will and I are swingers. That’s the craziest one. It’s constant,” she said, before joking, “And I’m like, ‘Yo, I wish!’” She also shared some insight into how the couple of two decades manage to keep it “hot”: “I really think that Will and I just have amazing chemistry on a lot of different levels. We love to laugh together, we love to learn together, and we just love each other. We just have a good time together. Yeah, I guess that’s the secret. Yeah, we just really like each other!”
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In January 2018, the Pursuit of Happiness star penned a touching tribute to his wife on their wedding anniversary, listing all of the things he learned throughout their marriage. “Love is Like Gardening... I have learned to focus on HELPING you to BLOSSOM into what YOU want to be (into what you were born to be)... Rather than Demanding that you become what my Fragile Ego needs you to be,” he wrote. “I’ve learned to take pleasure in Nourishing YOUR dreams... Rather than wrestling with you to Fulfill my Selfish Needs & Satiate My Insecurities.” “I have learned that Love is Listening. Love is Giving,” Smith continued before adding, “Happy Anniversary, My Queen! I am forever Devoted to Nurturing your Deepest Truth.”
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In May 2018, Smith released a sneak peek of some new tracks he had been working on and in one, called “To the Clique,” he raps, “Stop the divorce rumors and mind your damn business.”
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Pinkett Smith made it clear that she and the Bright actor were stronger than ever in June 2018. “Here’s the thing about Will and I — [we] are family. That is never going down,” Jada said while appearing on Sway’s Universe. “We are family. Take out all that whole marriage/ relationship crap, at the end of the day, Will and I are family. I am going to hold him down, doesn’t matter. All that relationship and what people think ideas of a husband, partner and all that, man, whatever. At the end of the day, that is a man that can rely on me for the rest of his life, period.”
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The Hitch star revealed that he and the A Different World alum no longer say they’re “married anymore” during an interview on TIDAL’s Rap Radar podcast in July 2018. “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. There’s no deal breakers. There’s nothing she could do — ever. Nothing that would break our relationship,” he said. “She has my support till death and it feels so good to get to that space.”
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Pinkett Smith spoke candidly about marriage and relationships in an emotional Instagram post in August 2018. “I’ve been watching a lot marriages dissolve around me,” she wrote alongside a happy family photo with husband Will Smith. “It’s been really painful. Marriages change. Sometimes they need to be reimagined and transformed. Sometimes they are simply over ... but either way, I pray that folks going thru this painful transition find the patience and the love within to not throw the 'babies' out with the bath water. #family”
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During an October 2018 appearance on his wife's Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk, Smith admitted that “there was a period" in their marriage where Pinkett Smith "woke up and cried 45 days straight." He added: “It was every morning. I think that’s the worst I’ve ever felt in our marriage. I was failing miserably.”
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Smith admitted during an October 2018 appearance on “Red Table Talk” that his wife didn’t want the life he built for them at one point during their marriage. “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,” he confessed. Despite their struggles, both Smith and Pinkett Smith said divorce was never an option for them during the episode.
“Because I had been divorced before, I wasn’t getting divorced again. Divorce wasn’t an option,” the actor confessed. “I was devastated even worse than a divorce. We broke up within our marriage and got back together again. We had to rebuild with new rules and something way, completely different.”
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Pinkett Smith admitted during a February 2019 episode of Red Table Talk that she had “very hard expectations” before marrying Smith. “The way I ended up with Will, I had to change my whole perspective because — I want you to know something — he was not the dude,” she said. “But I had to change that. I can’t ask somebody to be for me what I am not willing to be for them. And what I realized in my partnership with Will was that I was asking him to be a lot of things for me that I wasn’t willing to do for me.”
She added that, in tough times, they shifted again. “There have been several occasions where you just had enough and you want to leave, and I just couldn’t or Will just couldn’t,” she recalled. “Because we knew this was what was meant to be, this partnership, no matter what the form is. We had to redefine it, reform it, change it.”
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“[My mom] wanted me to have a wedding. She wanted me to get married,” Pinkett Smith told Us in May 2019. “I didn’t want to! … She told me to get married and we better have a wedding.”
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The Angel Has Fallen star revealed in April 2020 that she doesn’t “know Will at all,” noting that she was working on remedying the situation. “I feel like there’s a layer that you get to, right? 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. But that’s not who your partner is,” she explained on Red Table Talk. “[I’m] having to dissolve all the stories and all of the ideas of Will that I have built around those stories. 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.”
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In June 2020, Smith and Pinkett Smith once again faced rumors about their relationship. August Alsina claimed at the time that he had an affair with the Bad Moms actress for years — with her husband’s blessing. “Absolutely not true!” her rep told Page Six in response.
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The couple opened up about a past breakup between them during a July 2020 episode of Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk. After August Alsina claimed in June 2020 that he had an affair with Pinkett Smith years prior, she decided to address the rumors. According to Pinkett Smith, she met Alsina four and a half years earlier and they were just friends. Around the same time, she revealed that she and Smith had decided to split. “We decided that we were going to separate for a period of time,” Smith explained. “I really felt like we could be over.”
The actress said, “no, we were over,” which is what opened the door for the “different kind of entanglement” with Alsina. “It was a relationship,” she said of her brief romance with Alsina. “I was in a lot of pain, I was very broken. In the process of that relationship, I definitely realized that you can’t find happiness outside of yourself.” Pinkett Smith continued saying that the singer eventually broke off communication with her once she and Smith started to work on their relationship — and they haven’t spoken since.
“We have really gotten to that new place of unconditional love,” the Gotham alum said of her status with her husband now. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air alum admitted that “I wasn’t sure I was ever going to speak to you again,” before noting that marriage “ain’t for the weak at heart.” Pinkett Smith added: “I definitely believe that you and I never, ever, ever thought that we would make it back.” The two jokingly concluded: “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”
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Smith got real about his ups and downs with the Daytime Emmy winner while discussing his memoir, Will, during a September 2021 interview. “Jada never believed in conventional marriage. … Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship. So, she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up,” the actor told GQ’s Wesley Lowery. “There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection? What is the perfect way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.”
The Aladdin actor continued, “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way. And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our road for anybody. I don’t suggest this road for anybody. But the experiences that the freedoms that we’ve given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love.”
Smith also commented on his wife’s public comments about her brief affair with Alsina.“The public has a narrative that is impenetrable,” he explained. “Once the public decides something, it’s difficult to impossible to dislodge the pictures and ideas and perceptions.”
The father of three didn’t expand further on Pinkett Smith’s past romance, but he did say she wasn’t the only one to stray in their relationship. “A viewer could have walked away thinking that Jada was the only one engaging in other sexual relationships, when that was not, Smith delicately explained to me, in fact the case,” Lowery wrote after speaking with the musician.
from Celebrity News – Us Weekly https://ift.tt/2LCB9PD
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