Jada Pinkett Smith has continued to open up about what led to her and husband Will Smith’s seven-year long separation.
In a clip from an upcoming Today interview with Hoda Kotb, Jada explained why she thought her marriage with Will was “fractured” before they separated. “Why it fractured, that’s a lot of things,” she said in the interview, set to air on 13 October.
The two actors were married in 1997 and decided to separate in 2016 after almost two decades of marriage. However, the couple has yet to legally divorce.
While discussing their decision to separate, Jada said both of them had been tired of trying to preserve their marriage. “And I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be,” the Red Table Talk host said.
She said she had made a promise that she and Will wouldn’t get a divorce and although she had considering breaking that promise, Jada could never go through with it. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever,” the actor said. “And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”
Will and Jada have spoken honestly about their relationship over the years, as Will has made similar comments regarding divorce before the two were separated. In 2006, he told MTV News that divorce “wasn’t an option” for him and Jada.
“With Jada, I stood up in front of God and said: ‘Til death do us part,’” he said at the time. “So there are two possible outcomes. One, we are going to be together ‘til death, or two, I am dead.”
In 2008, the King Richard actor once again said on the The Ellen DeGeneres Show that “divorce wasn’t an option” for them. “It’s really that simple. And I think that’s the problem with LA - there are so many options. So a huge part of the success for [Jada] and I is that we just removed the other options,” he said.
As for Jada, she shared a similar mindset when it came to divorce. During a 2018 episode of Red Table Talk, when Will and Jada had secretly been separated for two years, she recalled what she said to Will before they got married. “I told Will from the gate, I said let me tell you something: ‘If you marry me, know this: we’re gonna be together. We’re going to be under the same roof,’” Jada said. “For me personally, I’m not mature enough to have a divorce, I’m just not. I don’t think I would ever be mature enough, I don’t.”
However, in the interview with Kotb, Jada noted that her current relationship with Will is a “divorce without the papers”. Throughout the last seven years, the public has been unaware the couple have been separated, as they continued to attend events together and deny divorce rumours.
“We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together,”Jada said. “We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”
