Photo: Getty
Jada Pinkett Smith has shed more light on her marriage with her now-estranged husband, Will Smith, during the promotional trail for her new memoir Worthy.
Last week, the Red Table Talk host shocked her fanbase after announcing that she and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air have been separated since 2016. That means the pair weren’t together when Will slapped Chris Rock across the face on the Oscars stage over a joke about Jada’s shaved head.
And now, the 52-year-old has reflected on her marriage to Will, admitting that most of their time together left her “spiritually bankrupt” due to the conflict of their “love languages”. Eventually, she ended up feeling “resentful” of Will for being unable to achieve her wants and needs during their time together before learning years later that it was up to herself to make her happy.
“Will’s [love language] was ‘I want to work… I want to work hard so you can have everything in the world that you’d ever want, you’re not going to need anything’,” she told Steven Bartlett in The Diary Of A CEO. “But my love language was like, ‘I just want you to be here with me, I don’t need all of that stuff, I just want to look into your eyes and feel your love and feel your protection here with me’. I wanted to make a masterpiece out of our connection, and he wanted to make a masterpiece out of life itself. And neither’s wrong, and that’s what I had to learn.”
When quizzed by Steven on a chapter in her memoir in which she detailed her loss of identity and her “resentment” toward Will at being unable to “grasp her journey”, Jada elaborated: “I felt as though at that time, I was like, ‘I want to help you do all of those things. And in return, I should get a bit of what I want, which is this connection. So for me, just giving, and giving, and giving, and giving and not realizing that I was abandoning myself in the hopes that if I just keep pouring into this, if I keep pouring into him, if I keep pouring into his dream, I’m going to eventually get what I want and that’s a false idea in so many ways. And so many of us do that.”
Jada continued: “If Will looked back and gave me whatever I was looking for, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish it anyway because if I’m not connected to myself, I don’t have a good relationship with me, there’s nothing he can do. So that’s part of the journey. There’s no right or wrong. People are always trying to find the good guy and bad guys in people’s stories. There are no good guys or bad guys, we’re all wounded trying to figure this out. It took me a long time to figure out it is not his responsibility to make you happy. He can’t!”
Photo: NBC
This interview comes a few days after Jada revealed to Hoda Kotb on Today that she and Will had been separated since 2016, adding that they have been living “completely separate lives” but still pretending to be more-or-less happily married for all of that time.
The Fresh Prince of Bell Air star Will and Jada Pinkett Smith wed in 1997 and have two children together: 25-year-old Jaden and 22-year-old Willow.
Originally published in Glamourmagazine.co.uk
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