April 25, 2013

By Zenitha Prince

Special to the NNPA from the Afro-American Newspaper

 

For years there were whispers—amused, condemning, even envious—about the supposed “open” marriage of entertainment super couple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Some have theorized that the arrangement is the secret to their near-16-year union, which began after they met on the set of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

But on April 14 , Jada took to Facebook to debunk the urban myth.

In the five paragraph post, the actress and mother of three addressed statements she made during an interview with The Huffington Post earlier that month, in which she said “Will is his own man.”

“I’ve always told Will, ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be okay,’” she told HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill. “Because at the end of the day, Will is his own man. I’m here as his partner, but he is his own man. He has to decide who he wants to be and that’s not for me to do for him. Or vice versa.”

The seemingly ambiguous statements fuelled even more speculation about the nature of her marriage, and she apparently felt the need to clarify her statements.

In her Facebook response, the 41-year-old said that while “there are far more important things to talk about in regards to what is happening in the world than whether I have an open marriage or not,” she felt the need to “discuss the relationship between trust and love and how they co-exist.”

After posing a series of rhetorical questions on the matter, she concluded: “Here is how I will change my statement…Will and I BOTH can do WHATEVER we want, because we TRUST each other to do so. This does NOT mean we have an open relationship…this means we have a GROWN one.”

Category: Arts & Culture