While they have been married for 23 years, with two grown children to show for it, Jada Pinkett Smith has said that life in quarantine has taught her that she does not know her husband, Will Smith, as well as she thought she did.
Pinkett Smith said this in the latest episode of her Red Table Talk which featured her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones and daughter, Willow Smith. They were joined virtually by the Smiths’ relationship coach, Michaela Boehm.
In the episode in which Pinkett Smith explored how couples were affected by lockdown measures, she said she had discovered that she did not know her husband or herself as much as she thought she did.
“It’s challenging. You’re forced to look at things differently. One of the things I realize is that I don’t know Will at all.”
“Let me tell you, that’s been something: To be married to someone for 20-some odd years and then realize, ‘I don’t know you and you don’t know me.’ But also realizing there’s an aspect of yourself you don’t know either.”
She said the Smiths have had to relearn how to love themselves and each other. “The thing that Will and I are learning to do is be friends,” Pinkett Smith added.
“Because you get into all of these ideas about what intimate relationships are supposed to look like, what marriages are supposed to be.
“So Will and I are in the process of him taking the time to learn to love himself, me taking the time to learn to love myself, right? And us building a friendship along the way,” she said.
Will and Jada married in 1997 and have a son, Jayden (21) and a daughter, Willow (19).
