Are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith still married? Their separation, explained

Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith have paradoxically enjoyed one of the longest marriages in Hollywood and one of the rockiest. Similarly, their relationship has been as publicized and candid as it’s been kept secret and ambiguous. Despite the Smiths dropping hints that their marriage was an open and unconventional one for the better part of a decade, the revelations made by the Matrix actress in 2023 at the time of the release of her memoir Worthy have been the clearest window into their arrangement yet.

Are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith divorced?

No. And they’re adamant that they never will be. However, they aren’t exactly living a shared life either. Many fans of the couple were shocked to discover Jada and Will have been separated since 2016 after the former laid it all out in an interview with Today‘s Hoda Kotb.

Married in 1997, and parents to two children, Jaden and Willow, Will and Jada have been leading completely separate lives for seven years now. Publicly, however, they continued to present a united front, attending events together, spending time together with their kids — including Will’s first son, Trey, with his first wife Sheree Zampino — and speaking about their relationship, however cryptically. And, of course, who could forget the “Keep my wife’s name out of your f**king mouth!” debacle at the 2022 Oscars?

Looking back, they had already told us, to an extent, about their peculiar arrangement. As Jada also told Kotb, she has never been able to divorce Will. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through … whatever.”

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s open marriage

Rumors that the two maintained an open, non-monogamous, marriage started as early as 2013, but their language around the subject has always been incredibly coded and hard to decipher.

In 2018, on the Rap Radar podcast, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor went as far as to say that he and Jada no longer saw each other as being “married,” but rather “life partners” whose bond could not be broken. In 2023, Jada echoed much of this sentiment, saying they had never revealed the exact status of their marriage because they were still trying to figure out a way to present that unique “partnership” publicly.

Still, even if Will’s ambivalent comments flew under most people’s radars in 2018, by 2020 everyone started suspecting that the couple wasn’t exactly close anymore. That was the year when Jada dropped the bomb about her “entanglement” with her son Jaden’s friend August Alsina, which happened in 2016. “I was done with you,” Smith candidly revealed on the now-infamous episode of Jada’s talk show Red Table Talk. The couple then worked through it with the help of “therapizing,” according to the actor and rapper, to not lose their family.

While everyone at the time assumed Jada and Will had forgiven each other and gone back to being a couple, we now know that those traumatic events did mark the end of what they used to be, and the start of a new kind of marriage. A year later, Will confirmed, in so many words, what we now know to be true: They were married, yes, but no longer exclusive.

“Jada never believed in conventional marriage,” the Oscar-winner told GQ in 2021, adding that, for them to stay married, it can’t feel like “a prison,” and that they had given each other “trust and freedom” to live out their lives. Their “deep love” for one another, Jada told People two years on, is what has justified staying married. However, in order to do that, and not feel caged, they’ve had to carve out a special kind of synergy.

It really does seem like the agreement has worked out for them, as they continue to parent their children together and support one another unconditionally, without dissolving their marriage altogether. “You get into that space where you realize you are literally with somebody for the rest of your life. There’s no deal breakers. There’s nothing she could do — ever — nothing that would break our relationship. She has my support till death, and it feels so good to get to that space,” Will said on Rap Radar. Well, good for them!