Will Smith has been opening up about his relationship journey with wife Jada Pinkett Smith for years. After the couple went public with their brief separation and Jada’s subsequent romance with August Alsina during an emotional Red Table Talk, a past Instagram Story video of Will has resurfaced in which he talks about “retiring” from trying to make his wife happy.
The clip, which was seemingly taken in 2018, features the two-time Oscar nominee talking about his marriage to Jada.
“I asked her what does she think is one of the biggest revelations that she had about love? She said, ‘You cannot make a person happy.’ And I thought that was a real deep idea,” Will admits. “You can make a person smile. You can make a person feel good. You can make a person laugh. But whether or not a person is happy is deeply and totally and utterly out of your control.”
The actor, who shares son Jaden, 22, and daughter Willow, 19, with Jada adds that he made the decision to stop trying to make her happy.
“I remember the day I retired. I literally said to Jada, ‘That’s it. I retire. I retire from trying to make you happy. I need you to go make yourself happy and just prove to me that it’s even possible,'” he says. “And after we cracked the hell up, we started talking about how we came into this false romantic concept that somehow when we got married that we would become one. And we realized is that we were two completely separate people on two completely separate individual journeys and that we were choosing to walk our separate journeys together. Her happiness was her responsibility and my happiness was my responsibility.”
Will goes on to add, “We decided that we were going to find our individual, internal private separate joy and then we were going to present ourselves to the relationship and to each other already happy. Not coming to each other begging with our empty cups out, demanding that she fill my cup and demanding that she meet my needs. It’s unfair and it’s kind of unrealistic and can be destructive to place the responsibility for your happiness on anybody other than yourself.”
In the recent episode Red Table Talk, Jada confirmed that she started a “friendship” with Alsina four and a half years ago while she and Will said they were going through a “really difficult time.”
“I was done with your a**. I was done with you,” Will agreed.
