Jada Pinkett Smith Admits the Quarantine is Testing Her Marriage

Jada Pinkett Smith reveals that she doesn’t know her husband of 23 years, as well as she, thought she did.

She opened up about her quarantine experience on Wednesday’s episode of Red Table Talk. “I gotta be honest. I think one of the things that I’ve realized is that I don’t know Will at all,” she said.

The actress explained that sometimes people who are married for a long time hold on to old ideas of who they think their partner is. “I feel like there’s a layer that you get to, 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, that’s not who your partner is,” she said.

Jada says she’s using this time to get to know the real Will Smith. “[I’m] going through the process of having to dissolve all of those stories and all the ideas of Will,” she said, adding, “This is intimacy. Just being able to get to who our loved ones are beyond that which we have perceived.”

The 48-year-old said their main objective is to build a friendship. “The thing that Will and I are learning to do is be friends,” she said. “You get into all these ideas of what intimate relationships are supposed to look like, what marriages are supposed to be.”

Building a friendship for the power couple looks like building self-love. “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 and us building a friendship along the way,” she said.