Making a Hollywood marriage work is tough, but many couples have offered fans a glimpse at their ability to have it all figured out.
Since their marriage in 1994, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have continued to be open about their relationship ups and downs. The duo originally met in 1992 but did not start dating until the following year. At the time, Will was still married to Sheree Zampino and their divorce was finalized in 1995 after three years of marriage.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air alum previously reflected on how the circumstances allowed him and his now-wife to privately focus on their relationship.
“My divorce from Sheree wasn’t yet final, so Jada and I decided it would be prudent if we kept our relationship under wraps. (We were both pretty famous, and we felt it just wouldn’t have been a great look.),” Will, who shares son Trey with his ex, wrote in his memoir in November 2021. “The blessed yet unintended consequence was that we spent every single moment together, just us. The first three or four months were as wild a romantic whirlwind as our bodies could have possibly handled.”
After their nuptials, Will and Jada welcomed son Jaden in 1998 and daughter Willow in 2000. Over the years, the pair have gotten candid about the issues in their marriage that led to a separation in 2015.
“I was done with your ass. I was done with you,” the rapper joked during an episode of Red Table Talk in July 2020, referring to their previous split. “Marriages have that, though. We decided that we were going to separate for a period of time, and you go figure out how to make yourself happy and I’ll try to figure out how to make myself happy. I really felt like we could be over.”
At the time, the Girls Trip actress noted that she got into an “entanglement” with August Alsina while separated from her husband. Jada clarified that Will wasn’t aware about the brief connection with Alsina but that they have since “really gotten to that new place of unconditional love.”
The Grammy award winner, for his part, later shared how communication allowed the twosome to have a resilient romance.
“But the heart and soul of our union was then, and is still today, intense, luminescent conversation. Even to the writing of this very sentence, if Jada and I begin a conversation, it is a minimum two-hour endeavor. And it is not uncommon that we talk for five or six hours at a stretch,” he recalled in his memoir. “Our joy of pondering and pursuing the mysteries of the universe, through the mirror of each other’s experience, is unbridled ecstasy. Even in the depths of disagreement, there is nothing in this world that either of us more cherishes or enjoys than the opportunity to grow and learn from each other through passionate communication.”
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