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Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith both had to make many compromises to make their marriage work. And although Smith was the man that Jada Pinkett wanted to marry, the visual image she had of her husband didn’t align with the reality.

Jada Pinkett Smith’s expectations for Will Smith were too high

Will Smith posing alongside Jada Pinkett Smith at the 22nd Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith | Rebecca Sapp/WireImage

Jada Pinkett already had some idea of what life would be like after marrying Smith. But the life she imagined was far from what it would actually become. Speaking to rapper Wale on her Red Table Talk (via Entertainment Tonight), Jada Pinkett talked about one of the hardest lessons she learned from marriage.

“Let me tell you, nobody talks about the sacrifice, the deteriorating and dissolving of fantasies,” she told the rapper. “You right now, have in your mind, your perfect woman. And when you find that woman, she will be a goddess to you. We fall in love with the goddess, or the god, within that person, and then when we actually meet the human being, then we gotta learn how to love that one. The reason why it is so important to me to be able to stick it out, to really get to the true meaning of love, in my opinion, it is unconditional. It has to be, because we are all too flawed. No matter how much work we do! It never ends.”

To get to that point of realization with Smith, Jada Pinkett had to get over the fantasy of the husband she had in her head. She confided that the expectations she set for Smith were due to growing up in a single-parent household.

“I came to the table with a lot of pain and a lot of brokenness. And most of all, I came to the table with some hardcore daddy issues,” she added. “It made me really angry towards men. I had very high expectations. I was hard. I could’ve ended up with all kinds of dudes. The way I ended up with Will, I had to change my whole, perspective, because I want you to know something, he was not the dude! But I had to change that. I can’t ask somebody to be for me, what I am not willing to be for them. And what I realized in my partnership with Will, was I was asking him to be a lot of things for me that I wasn’t willing to do for me.”

Jada Pinkett Smith recently shared she’s working very hard to bring back her life partnership with Will Smith

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Jada Pinkett asserted that the work and sacrifices she and Smith made were worth it at the time. But recently, her marriage with Smith was put into question. She revealed in an interview that she’d been separated from Smith for quite a while.

“We’re still figuring it out,” she told People. “We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”

But it seems she and Smith still hold out hope that their relationship could be fully repaired. In her memoir Worthy, she revealed that she and Smith were taking necessary steps to reclaim what they lost.

“There’s no finding another great love, and I think that’s the point,” she wrote. “It’s like we are in a place now that we are in a deep, healing space. And we are really concentrating on healing the relationship between us. There’s no divorce on paper. We really have been working hard. That’s the whole thing. We are working very hard at bringing our relationship together. Back to a life partnership.”