Will Smith has said Jada Pinkett Smith’s truth bombs ‘kind of woke him up’ to the fact his estranged wife is more ‘resilient, clever and compassionate that he’d understood.’ 

The actor admitted in an email that he had developed ’emotional blindness’ to her ‘hidden nuances’ after Jada revealed to the world that the pair have lived ‘completely separate lives’ since 2016.

The prominent Hollywood couple married in 1997 and have addressed separations and marital troubles in the past, but Pinkett Smith revealed in an interview with Hoda Kotb last week that the pair essentially have a divorce without papers.

Smith, 55, and Pinkett Smith, 52, share two children, Willow and Jaden, as well as a son, Trey, from Smith’s first marriage.

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The actor admitted in an email that he had developed ’emotional blindness’ to her ‘hidden nuances’ after Jada revealed to the world that the pair have lived ‘completely separate lives’ since 2016

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Smith, 55, and Pinkett Smith, 52, share two children, Willow and Jaden, as well as a son, Trey, from Smith’s first marriage

The NYT said that her new memoir, named Worthy, ‘kind of woke Will up’ as he realized that his wife was living ‘more on the edge’ than he’d realized.

Will said in an email to the newspaper: ‘When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.’

He has only just realized that she is ‘more resilient, clever and compassionate than he’d understood,’ the NYT reported.

Despite all of the personal problems Jada’s faced with her marriage, that they have revealed to the world, she said that she would also want to live with Will again.

She told The Times of London: ‘I think eventually we will [live together again.] I really do. Will’s getting old. I’m staying quite young, but it’s getting apparent to me that he’s gonna need someone to take care of him.’

On Sunday, Will Smith clearly did not want to address the situation further, and posted a video of him asleep on a boat with the caption: ‘Notifications off :)’

News of the couple’s split came as a surprise to many, considering Pinkett Smith’s candor in her Red Table Talk series, in which she and Smith addressed her extramarital relationship in an episode in 2020, and the slap at the 2022 Academy Awards.

At the ceremony, Smith infamously walked up on stage and struck presenter Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s hair.

Smith has apologized several times for the incident , which got him a 10-year ban on attending the Oscars or any other academy event.

And at the time, no one in the public knew that the highly-publicized couple had been living apart since 2016.

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The prominent Hollywood couple married in 1997 and have addressed separations and marital troubles in the past, but Pinkett Smith revealed in an interview with Hoda Kotb that the pair essentially have a divorce without papers

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The couple pictured in November 2022

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Actor Will Smith poses with his pregnant wife Jada Pinkett Smith

Since then, she and Smith have made many public declarations of their love and admiration for each other, suggesting their separation was amicable.

The New York Times describes the couple as ‘life partners in family and business, long maintaining an agreement they call ‘a relationship of transparency.”

Indeed, when Will Smith wrote his own memoir in 2021, he gave the impression that the pair were in a deep and strong relationship.

In a TV interview last year he said: ‘There’s never been infidelity in our marriage. Jada and I talk about everything, and we have never surprised one another with anything ever.’

But it is now clear that the real situation is vastly different.

‘Why not just amicably divorce? Why not just do that’, Hoda Kotb asked during Friday’s interview.

‘We don’t want to,’ Pinkett Smith replied.

‘We love our family, and we love each other. You know, it’s more of a life partnership. Now, ten years from now, who knows?’ Pinkett Smith said.

She told Kotb: ‘By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.’

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Family: Will and Jada pictured with their children Willow and Jaden and also his son Trey (left) in 2022

She wrote in her book: ‘It was not a divorce on paper. But it was a divorce.’

Pinkett Smith, who admitted in 2020 that she’d had an affair with singer August Alsina, said she considered a legal divorce but could never go through with it, candidly revealing that she made a ‘promise’ to her husband that she would never give him a ‘reason’ to get divorced.

‘I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through… whatever,’ she said.

INSIDE WILL SMITH AND JADA PINKETT SMITH’S 26-YEAR MARRIAGE

Jada and Will have been married since 1997 after they met while she was auditioning to be his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air

The couple have previously denied they are swingers or in an open relationship

‘I’m like, “Yo, I wish. I wish!”‘ Jada told Andy Cohen in 2017 of the persistent swinging rumors

Yet they have remained open about their sex lives, often sharing intimate details

At the premier of his movie Focus, Will let slip that Jada loves to watch his sex scenes

‘She’s a little freaky like that,’ he joked

In 2010, Jada told Oprah Winfrey that spontaneity is key to her and Will’s relationship

‘During the day I might send a sexy picture of some sort …If he’s on set with me, we might take a break,’ she said

Just a year earlier, she’d offered advice in a Redbook interview that it was important to move things outside of the bedroom

‘Does he have access to his office? Have a fantasy date. Be his secretary! Pull over on the side of the road…Just switch it up,’ she said

In 2010,  the couple took their own advice in their limo on the way to the Oscars

‘We started kissing passionately, and the next thing I knew, well, let’s just say we missed the red carpet and I ended up with almost no makeup on,’ Jada revealed

The actress also claimed it was Will who first told her about the ‘Grapefruit Method’ made famous in her movie  Girls Trip

‘We will work through whatever and I just haven’t been able to break that promise.’

‘But you still live separately?’ Kotb probed, prompting her to confirm: ‘We live separately’.

News of Jada’s fling with August first emerged in 2020 – but she and Will initially denied the allegations, claiming they were ‘absolutely not true’.

In a bombshell interview with radio host Angela Yee on June 30 that year, August said that he had been romantically involved with Jada and that he had received Will’s blessing.

‘I actually sat down with Will and had a conversation due to the transformation from their marriage to life partnership. He gave me his blessing,’ he explained.

‘I totally gave myself to that relationship for years of my life, and I truly and really, really, deeply loved and have a ton of love for her. I devoted myself to it.

‘I gave my full self to it. So much so that I can die right now, and be okay knowing that I fully gave myself to somebody, some people never get that in this lifetime. It almost killed me. Not almost. It did – it pushed me into being another person. It broke me down.’

August continued: ‘It probably will be the hardest thing I ever had to experience in this lifetime. Contrary to what some people may believe, I’m not a troublemaker. I don’t like drama. Drama actually makes me nauseous.

‘I also don’t think that it’s ever important for people to know what I do, who I sleep with, who I date, right? But in this instance, there are so many people who are side-eyeing me… And I think it’s because people don’t necessarily know the truth,’ he added.

The following month, Jada sat down with Will to address the rumors regarding the status of their relationship – and decided to film the entire conversation on camera as part of her Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk.

Jada confirmed that she was in an ‘entanglement’ with August – but insisted that she and Will were separated at the time.

‘We were over,’ she said to Will on the episode. ‘From there, as time went on, I got into a different kind of entanglement with August.’

However, the pair denied August’s claim that Will had given him permission to pursue the relationship with Jada.

‘One of the things I want to clear up that was kind of swirling in the press was you giving permission, which the only person who can give permission in that particular circumstance is myself,’ Jada said.

‘But what August was actually trying to communicate – because I could actually see how he would perceive it as permission because we were separated amicably – I think he also wanted to make it clear that he’s not a homewrecker, which he’s not.’