‘Bad Marriage For Life’: Inside The Enigma Of Will And Jada Pinkett Smith’s Bizarre Union
Long before the slap heard ‘round the world, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s marriage was a source of fascination. The Hollywood couple doesn’t believe in doing things conventionally. So their marriage, their parenting, their careers, all of it, is totally foreign to most people.
The Smiths have been making headlines for decades in part because of their approach to marriage. There was that time when Jada described being a wife as a “golden cage.” Based on what she’s said in multiple interviews, it’s clear the “Girls Trip” actress was never in love with the idea of marriage. She did it because she felt pressure from her mother and Will. That could be part of what led the Smiths to have an open relationship.
The details of Will and Jada’s unusual arrangement became public in 2013 when Jada alluded to them seeing other people. She had made a comment during an interview with HuffPost Live that almost but didn’t quite clarify their arrangement:
“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,’” she said at the time, according to US Weekly.
When her vague statement caused even more speculation, Jada addressed the world once again, but this time in a social media post.
“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.”
Then there was Jada’s infamous “entanglement” with a rap artist not much older than her son. Their affair came up again after Will slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage during the 2022 Oscars for making a joke about Jada’s bald head amid her struggle with alopecia.
Critics called Will a cuckold and joked about how ridiculous it was that he took issue with someone cracking jokes about his wife but not with other men having sex with her. The Smiths, however, have very vocally defended getting involved with other people for years.
In July 2020, the couple discussed infidelity rumors during an episode of Jada’s Facebook show, “Red Table Talk.”
During the bombshell conversation, Jada explained how rap artist August Alsina was experiencing addiction and health issues, and initially, she just wanted to help him.
“It all started with him just needing some help…me wanting to help his health, his mental state,” she said before admitting that she and Will were struggling in their marriage and separated at the time.
“I was done with your a**,” Will clarified. “Marriages have that. We decided that we were going to go separate for a period of time, and you figure out how to make yourself happy, and I’ll figure out how to make myself happy…I really felt like we could be over.”
Jada added, “At that particular point in time, it was indefinite.” The mom of two described her romantic partnership with Alsina, 29, as an “entanglement.”
“It was a relationship,” she said. “I was very broken. Now in the process of that relationship, I definitely realized that you can’t find happiness outside of yourself. And luckily enough, you and I were also going through a process of healing in a much different manner.”
“I just wanted to feel good,” she continued. “It had been so long since I’d felt good. And it was really a joy to just help heal somebody. I think that has a lot to do with my co-dependency, which is another thing that I had to learn to break in the cycle. Just the idea of needing to fix and being drawn to people that need help.”
Jada explained that she didn’t need “permission” from Will to get involved with another man while still married.
“The only person that can give permission in that particular circumstance is myself,” Jada said. “I could actually see how he would perceive it as permission because we were separated amicably. And I think [August] also wanted to make it clear that he’s not a homewrecker, which he’s not.”
Finally, Jada insisted she didn’t regret hooking up with Alsina. “I actually don’t look at it as a transgression at all,” she explained. “Through that particular journey, I learned so much about myself and was able to really confront a lot of emotional immaturity, emotional insecurity, and I was really able to do some really deep healing.”
It’s true that Jada’s affair with Alsina is the most notorious. However, Will and Jada insist that their open arrangement goes both ways. During a 2021 interview with GQ, Will said both he and Jada have engaged in sexual relationships outside of their marriage.
Will detailed his obsession with having a “harem” of women and how he sought the advice of an intimacy coach to help process those feelings.
“I don’t know where I saw it or some s*** as a teenager, but the idea of traveling with 20 women that I loved and took care of and all of that, it seemed like a really great idea,” the 53-year-old actor said. “And then, after we played it out a little bit, I was like, ‘That would be horrific. That would be horrific.’”
“What [the coach] was doing was essentially cleaning out my mind, letting it know it was okay to be me and be who I was,” he explained. “It was okay to think Halle [Berry] is fine. It doesn’t make me a bad person that I’m married and I think Halle is beautiful. Whereas in my mind, in my Christian upbringing, even my thoughts were sins.”
“That was really the process that [the coach] worked me through to let me realize that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of s***,” Will said.
Will went on to detail how his and Jada’s open marriage was mainly a product of the atmosphere in which she was raised.
“Jada never believed in conventional marriage … Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship,” Will told GQ. “So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up.”
“There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection?” he continued. “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.”
“We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way,” Will said. “And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our 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.”
In that same interview, the “Bad Boys” alum described the “breaking point” that led to the couple reevaluating their relationship and how it would work.
“Our marriage wasn’t working,” Will recalled. “We could no longer pretend. We were both miserable and clearly something had to change.”
The saga of Will and Jada began back in 1990 when she auditioned to play his girlfriend on the television sitcom, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” She didn’t get the part, but the actress did snag the star’s attention. The problem was that Will had been married to his first wife, Sheree Zampino, since May 1992, and they had a son, Trey, in November 1992. They divorced in 1995, and Will tied the knot with Jada in 1997.
“Divorce was the worst thing in my adult life,” Will said 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.”
This reality factored into Will and Jada’s decision to have an open marriage rather than get divorced.
But Jada didn’t ever want to get married in the first place. “I knew that I was not built for conventional marriage,” she said in a 2019 interview with The Guardian. “Even the word ‘wife’: it’s a golden cage, swallow the key. Even before I was married, I was like, ‘That’ll kill me.’ And it damn near did!”
She said it wasn’t Will specifically who was the issue, but instead was the institution itself and the sacrifices it entailed.
“Will is my life partner, and I could not ask for a better one. I adore him, I never want people to think it was Will I didn’t want to marry,” Jada told the publication. “But I can assure you that some of the most powerful women in the world feel caged and tied because of the sacrifices they have to make to be in that position. So I wanted to talk about how we really feel about marriage.”
“I was under so much pressure, you know, being a young actress and pregnant, and I didn’t know what to do,” Jada said of getting married to Will while pregnant with Jaden. “I cried all night long,” she said during a Red Table Talk episode. “I was like, ‘my life is never going to be the same.’”
“I was so upset that I had to have a wedding,” Jada continued, explaining that her mother pressured her into the nuptial ceremony. “I was so pissed. I went crying down the freakin aisle. I cried the whole way down the aisle.”
Interestingly, Will said he had opposite thoughts regarding marriage.
“There wasn’t a day in my life that I wanted anything other than being married and having a family,” Will said.
In a 2015 interview with Entertainment Tonight about his relationship, Will said, “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.”
Even though the pair admits to separating at various points, they’ve said on multiple occasions that they have no intentions of getting divorced.
During that July 2020 Red Table Talk, they jokingly shared their mantra. “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”
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