Jada Pinkett Smith has clarified that she and husband Will Smith are working to reconcile their marriage after she earlier revealed the pair have been separated, but not legally divorced, since 2016.
Pinkett Smith made the comments on Monday to Hoda Kotb of NBC’s Today, calling Smith her “great love.”
“There’s no finding another great love, and I think that’s the point,” she said. “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 might not be a divorce, in theory, anymore?” Kotb asked.
“We really have been working hard,” Pinkett Smith responded.
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Kotb seemed surprised by this revelation because Pinkett Smith had earlier said in a primetime interview with her that she and Smith had been living “separate lives” for the past seven years.
“It was not a divorce on paper,” Kotb clarified in the earlier interview released Friday.
“Right,” Pinkett Smith responded.
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“…but it was a divorce,” Kotb said.
“Divorce,” Pinkett Smith emphasized.
On Monday, Kotb asked Pinkett Smith to set the record straight: “Wait, just so I’m 100 per cent clear, you were divorced, but not on paper, and now we might be at a point where we’re back together,” referring to Pinkett Smith and Smith’s relationship.
“We are working very hard at bringing our relationship together,” Pinkett Smith said.
“Back to a marriage again?” Kotb asked.
“Back to a life partnership,” Pinkett Smith clarified.
“Here’s the thing about husband-wife marriage for me, for my healing process,” she continued.
“I came into that with very specific ideas that were blocks to me seeing just Will as who he is. He can’t be this perfect, idealized husband. I have to be able to accept him for the human that he is, he accepts me for the human that I am. And we want to love each other there.”
“OK, so you might live in the same house?” Kotb asked.
“Yes,” Pinkett Smith confirmed.
The relationship status of the two actors has been the subject of numerous headlines in recent weeks as Pinkett Smith promotes her tell-all memoir Worthy, which includes details about her marriage, mental health struggles and childhood. The book is on store shelves as of Tuesday.
Smith issued a statement to the New York Times about the memoir, saying it “kind of woke him up.”
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties,” he said.
Pinkett Smith addressed her husband’s remarks with Kotb, saying she thinks “emotional blindness” is “so universal in relationships — he didn’t see me and I didn’t see him.”
“We had to go our separate ways to really look at ourselves and see the blocks that we had in order to find a way back.”
Coming off a busy few weeks in the spotlight, Smith made his first Instagram post since he and Pinkett Smith’s marital revelations emerged.
“Notifications off,” he captioned the video of him while sleeping on a boat.
Comedian Chris Rock, who was earlier implicated in the couple’s drama, has yet to speak out publicly on the Smiths’ marital issues.
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