Actress Jada Pinkett Smith has been consistently dropping gems on us, and now more than ever with Red Table Talk. She took to her Instagram to share another life lesson that she has gained through her own experience, which is that romantic love, though a major component in relationships, is not enough to sustain a healthy marriage.
The idea that a long-standing and healthy union takes a lot of effort from both husband and wife is no secret and is not unique to Will and Jada's marriage of over twenty years. However, the reality is, that at moments, the person you vowed to spend the rest of your life with may make you cringe at the sight of them for one reason or another. This is a hard pill to swallow when society depicts a thriving marriage as two people who are head over heels in love with each other each and every day. Jada shared:
"I had an epiphany the other day. I had to call Will and say, 'You know what? I have to thank you for enduring my rage.' It made me realize how durable love must be because we don't have all the answers at the beginning, we go through life and we get the answers as we go, and we can break things as we are finding the answers."
For this couple, love has proven not only to be durable through the changes of life but adaptable to all of the ups and downs that life throws at us. Luckily for both Will and Jada, they have the type of relationship that allows them both to grow as individuals and come back with newfound perspectives that contribute to a healthy marriage. One of those newfound perspectives is that the theology that romantic love is enough to sustain a relationship is false. Jada shared how she became disillusioned:
"I used to believe that romantic love was the highest form of love until I realized how unmet standards of romantic love often justified it to turn into a cold heart that many times can fuel hateful and brutal actions of revenge and manipulation towards someone you 'say' or 'said' you loved. It actually may be the only form of love you can fall OUT of. At one point ... MY romantic standard of love was all that mattered and if it wasn't met ... there was more than hell to pay. My romantic standards were feeding my ego whether they were met or unmet."
When it comes to love of any kind, especially romantic, Jada emphasizes how important it is that we put effort into being our best selves, so that we can ultimately show up as our best selves in relationships. Furthermore, it is important to put ourselves in relationships with people who push us to be our best. Jada explained:
"I experienced some very hard lessons (and continue to do so) that formed the decision that my ego and my heart could not share the same space."
"It was also the deciding factor to transform my union to @willsmith from a marriage (contaminated with all the above) to a life partnership led by and steeped in 'devotional friendship'. The only thing to do in life is to find the form of love where we can give the best of ourselves AND ... it's not always going to look like you thought. Love, love and love some more ❤️"
In this day and age, where love is showcased on social media and, we only have access to a couple's highest moment but we still coin them as our #relationshipgoals (I am very guilty of this), it is important to aspire for the ingredients of healthy love, instead of idolizing what we perceive as the final product. That is because a healthy relationship is a work in progress, just as self-love is.
For any passion that we have, whether it be adopting a healthier lifestyle, a pursuit of an education, or just on the pursuit of happiness, anyone who is making strides towards those goals will tell you there are days they don't feel like doing the work. The workouts, the assignments, the self-care that needs to be done to achieve those goals is not always achieved through the feeling of motivation, but through the commitment of people who choose not to give up on their dreams.
I'd imagine that marriage is no different. As a single, young woman, I have yet to read the secret formula to marriage, but I'd imagine it entails a great deal of love, compassion, and the willingness to do the work necessary to keep a healthy relationship with each other.
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THIS Is The Reason Will Smith & Jada Pinkett Smith No Longer Say They're Married – Read More
Jada Pinkett Smith Gives Us The Secret To Healing From Heartbreak – Read More
How Will Smith's Revelation About Love Helped My Marriage – Read More
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Those rumors were more than laid to rest when Jodie and Joshua went to the 2023 Oscars together earlier this year, and even more recently, when they celebrated her birthday together last month during the September unveiling of the Lotus Emeya.
Jodie Turner-Smith celebrates her birthday with husband Joshua Jackson at the unveiling of the new fully-electric Lotus Emeya on September 07, 2023 in New York City.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for Lotus
Despite seeming particularly happy and in love, perhaps the writing was already written on the wall even then. In the past, Jodie has been very celebratory publicly about her love for her estranged husband, even boldly recounting their love story for the books in a 2021 interview with Seth Meyers.
When Jodie and Joshua met, it was while at his birthday party in 2018. Their relationship was hot and heavy from the start, with Jodie openly noting that they began as a "one-night stand." During her 2021 interview with Seth Meyers, she jokingly referred to their love story as a "three-year one-night stand." She shared:
"First of all, I saw him before he saw me and when I saw him, I was like, 'I want that.' And then when he saw me, I just pretended like I didn't see him. He had to yell across the room to me, and I was wearing this T-shirt from a movie called Sorry to Bother You and [actress] Tessa Thompson plays a character called Detroit, and she has this T-shirt that says, 'The Future Is Female Ejaculation.'
"And so, he shouts across the room, 'Detroit!' He comes over and… does this really cute, charming thing that he does and just all night -- he just basically followed me around the party."
The couple were together from that moment forth, and even made things "Instagram official" less than two weeks later while on a dinner date. Joshua would later clarify to Insider that the night they met in 2018 was not a 'one-night stand' or a 'three-year one-night stand' like his then-wife joked but instead, it was "technically a three-night stand."
"It was sealed with a kiss that night and then we didn't leave each other's sides for, well, three years now," Joshua continued at the time.
In a July 2021 interview with Jimmy Fallon, Joshua dropped more details about the why behind getting married. He revealed that he didn't know he wanted to get married to Jodie until "the moment she asked me."
"She asked me on New Year's Eve. We were in Nicaragua. It was very beautiful, incredibly romantic, we were walking down the beach and she asked me to marry her."
He added, "I did not know [she would propose], but she was quite adamant and she was right. This is the best choice I ever made."
Joshua Jackson Reveals Jodie Turner-Smith Proposed To Him
Jodie received quite a bit of flack for proposing to Joshua because it goes against tradition and what society sees as acceptable for a woman to do to a man, and proposing isn't one of them. No matter how much time has passed, the viewpoints around who should do the proposing and who should be proposed to are still very traditional.
After being on the receiving end of such backlash, Joshua would later clarify to the media in a separate interview that it wasn't just Jodie's proposal to him that sealed the deal of them getting married, he proposed to her too. She might have initiated it, but Joshua followed through.
"I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn't give the full context and holy Jesus, the internet is racist and misogynist," he explained to Refinery29 that same year. "We were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic."
David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images
He continued, "And yes, my wife did propose to me and yes, I did say yes, but what I didn't say in that interview was there was a caveat, which is that I'm still old school enough that I said, 'This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too].'"
"She has a biological father and a stepdad, who's the man who raised her. [I said], 'You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage.' And then, 'I would like the opportunity to re-propose to you and do it the old-fashioned way down on bended knee.' So, that's actually how the story ended up."
Joshua and Jodie would eventually marry in December 2019. Shortly thereafter, Jodie gave birth to the couple's first child, Janie, in 2020.
In a recent interview with Elle UK, Jodie shared the ways becoming a mother to Juno helped to heal her of her wounds from colorism she experienced in the past. "It's interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother and, throughout my life, I always said if I were to have children, I wanted to have Black, Black babies so that I could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world," Jodie shared with the outlet.
She continued, "Then I fell in love with my husband and we talked about having kids. I did have this mini pause, where I was like, 'She's going to be walking through the world not only having an experience that I did not have, but looking like people that, in a way, I'd always felt a little bit tormented by.' Now that I've got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it’s the universe teaching me lessons. I've been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colorism."
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Featured image by Amy Sussman/Getty Images
