Jada Pinkett Smith admits ‘fantasy’ of marriage to Will Smith’ is ‘shattered’

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith couldn’t live up to the “fantasy” of each other.

Jada explained the reason why she and Will hid the fact that they have been separated since 2016, as she revealed in her brutally honest upcoming memoir, Worthy.

“I think we were both kind of still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be,” the Red Table Talk hostess told Today’s Hoda Kotb in a preview clip of the NBC News special released Wednesday.

As the childhood sweethearts continued to figure out “between the two of us how to be in partnership,” they didn’t know how to present the true nature of their relationship to people.

Meanwhile, though, Jada never felt “ready” to legally split from Will.

“I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce,” she told Kotb, per Page Six. “I just haven’t been able to break that promise,” she expressed, adding that they will “work through whatever.”

The power couple, parents to Jaden Smith, Willow Smith, and Trey Smith, has long denied marital issues, presenting a united front on camera.

However, they got candid about Jada’s “entanglement” with singer August Alsina while she and Will had allegedly been privately separated on a 2020 Red Table Talk episode.

In a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, the Men in Black actor admitted, “We realized that it was a fantasy illusion that we could make each other happy.”

Reflecting on the “fracture” of their marriage, the mom-of-three admitted to Kotb, “I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying.”