I’m on the record as being a huge divorce stan (as the child of parents who split up amicably when I was eight, I can attest that sometimes the end of a marriage means the beginning of a new kind of happy family—not to mention a definite uptick in Christmas gifts), so it should probably come as no surprise that I was weirdly glad to hear that Will and Jada Pinkett Smith have actually been separated for the last seven years. Obviously, it would be nice if they were actually happily together (especially in the fallout from The Slap), but I can’t help finding it kind of iconic that they’ve been pulling the wool over the world’s prying eyes for so long. I mean, really, is it our business?
Of course, technically speaking, the couple is not divorced, and they don’t seem to be heading in that particular direction anytime soon. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce,” Pinkett Smith says in a clip from her upcoming NBC News special with Hoda Kotb, adding: “We will work through whatever. And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.” Seems…kind of weird to me, I guess, but again, what business is it of mine to decide what works for a pair of internationally famous celebrities?
If I were Will or Jada or anyone with any kind of clout to my name, I think I’d also be inclined to pull off a long-term feat of discretion about the state of my marriage; in an ugly world of anonymous internet commenters and TV pundits, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these two keeping their specific marital arrangement to themselves. “[We were] still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, right, and in regards to how do we present that to people, you know? And we hadn’t figured that out,” Pinkett Smith says in the clip—and TBH, I respect it.
Our still-prudish society doesn’t give a lot of leeway to people in nontraditional romantic relationships, but personally I’m all for any celebrity who manages to keep the truth of their marriage out of the tabloids, which I imagine must be an effort of Herculean proportions. All this is not, of course, to say that I won’t hungrily read those very same tabloids when the news does finally break—but I commend Pinkett Smith and Smith for trying.