Why oversharers Will and Jada didn't say they'd stopped saying 'husband and wife'

In a Friday prime-time interview with NBC’s TODAY show host Hoda Kotb, Jada Pinkett Smith, who’s promoting her new memoir “Worthy,” revealed that she and her husband, Will Smith, have been separated since 2016. It’s a revelation that left many of us scratching our heads in confusion. After all, when Smith accosted Chris Rock on the Oscars stage in 2022 and slapped him for a joke he’d just told about  Jada, he yelled at the comedian to “keep my wife’s name out of your f------ mouth!”

It was odd, Jada said, to hear Will refer to her as his wife because they hadn't "called each other husband and wife in a long time." That was news to fans who had been hearing for just as long that they were steadfast in their commitment to each other as they sought what Will Smith called “relational perfection” during an interview in 2021. On Monday, she told TODAY show host Hoda Kotb that the two are "really concentrating on healing the relationship between us. There’s no divorce on paper. We really have been working hard. That’s the whole thing. We are working very hard at bringing our relationship together. Back to a life partnership."

Will and Jada are the power couple at the head of a family brand that thrives on exposure. Their media company, Westbrook Studios, has not only produced critically acclaimed films including “King Richard,” for which won Smith an Oscar for Best Actor, but also “Red Table Talk,” an online talk show where Jada sits with her daughter, Willow Smith, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and conducts revealing deeply intimate conversations. Jada has not only shared her affection for sex toys and talked about losing her virginity, but she’s also had vulnerable conversations with Will’s ex-wife, Sheree Zampino.

At the beginning, Will was also there oversharing. In the first seasons, on episodes called “Becoming Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “Our Unique Union,” he and Jada described the storms they’d weathered in their then-20-year marriage and said they’d come out stronger. But if  Jada’s most recent admissions are to be believed, during those 2018 episodes, they were already separated.

That would mean they were also separated during their awkward conversation at “the table” in 2020 about Jada’s affair (she called it an “entanglement”) with R&B August Alsina. They said the affair happened when they were separated, which implied that as they were discussing the affair they were again living together as husband and wife.

For a long time, Will and Jada have gone to great lengths to present themselves as transparent about their private lives. Of course, they control the narrative by exposing themselves in a time and place that suits them, all the better if one of them has a book or film project to promote. On the one hand, this is neither surprising nor unique. Sociologists have long studied how we all try in our own big and small ways to manage the impressions we leave on others, including by selecting which information we offer about ourselves and which information we withhold. These are called everyday social performances. However, we’re generally not attempting to sell books, movies and talk shows based on what we project or keep away from the public. And we tend to be consistent with the stories we tell about who we are.

Divorces happen all the time, but it may be harder for a “power couple” to admit failure and split when so much of their identity and so much of the money they’ve made is wrapped up in their status as a couple. This may be even more true for the Black power couple that stands to lose their status as Black success stories. They are not just celebrated as exemplars of Black public life; they are seen as the vanguard shaping it.

In their October 2020 profile of Black couples "who make forever look easy,” Essence magazine asked, “What would beautiful Black love be without Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith as reigning king and queen?” (Again, based on Jada’s recent revelations, they’d already been separated for at least three years then.) On the website for the relationship television series “Black Love,” Will and Jada are featured as a couple that has the kind of love that has “changed the course of Black history.” They were put on a list that included Jackie Robinson and Rachel Robinson, Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King and Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Those couples have not only been celebrated as exemplars of Black public life; but are also seen as a vanguard shaping Black public life.

We’re drawn to, and can even find ourselves idolizing, power couples who seem to have it all: good health, good looks, financial success and romantic love. They appear to excel in everything from their professional lives to domesticity and they do so fueled by the power of two. However, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes about our bad habit of associating happiness with living a particular type of life that ultimately props up the status quo by minimizing its more destructive elements, especially for people of color and in queer communities.

The celebration of Black power couples as the pinnacle of Black achievement, success, desirability, and even love reveals a longing for the social rewards, be they financial or otherwise, that come with playing the game well. If we can’t play those roles ourselves, we want to see people who look like us in them.

Regardless of whether they reconcile, it now appears that Will and Jada were themselves playing roles, like the talented actors they are. We’re the ones who too often idolize power couples, but the revelation that their image of a successful marriage was more façade than reality suggests that they need the illusion more than we do.