Even Hoda Kotb was confused during her in-person interview with Jada Pinkett Smith on the Today show, which aired on Monday.
After a line of questioning about Pinkett Smith’s marriage status with Will Smith, the actress clarified that the couple are in fact trying to reconcile.
“There’s no finding another great love, and I think that’s the point,” she said. “It’s like we are in a place now that we are in a deep, healing space. And we are really concentrating on healing the relationship between us,” the actress explained in the NBC studio in New York City.
“There’s no divorce on paper. We really have been working hard. That’s the whole thing,” she continued. “We are working very hard at bringing our relationship together. Back to a life partnership.”
When Kotb asked her to clarify once more, Pinkett Smith laughed and noted she had a very clear idea as to what a marriage looked like for her when they tied the knot in 1997. (The “Girls Trip” actress previously said she “never” wanted to walk down the aisle.)
“Here’s the thing about husband-wife marriage for me, for my healing process. I came into that with very specific ideas that were blocks to me seeing Will as who he is,” she said on Monday. “He can’t be this perfect, ideal guy husband. I have to be able to accept him for the human that he is, he accepts me for the human that I am. And we want to love each other there.”
Pinkett Smith noted that the couple separated in 2016 because they “really needed time to get solidified.”
“Because at the end of the day we love each other,” she told Hotb. “We kind of had to go our separate ways to see each other.”
She added: “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.”
Restating that “there’s no divorce on paper,” she said that her recent public revelations, which she’s done while promoting her new book, “Worthy,” actually brought the pair closer together.
In fact, the actress even left two laughing emojis on Smith’s latest Instagram post, which showed him on a boat in the ocean. “Notifications off :)” he joked in the caption, seemingly referring to her eyebrow-raising revelations as of late.
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in,” Smith wrote in an email to the New York Times over the weekend. “And you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”
He added that her remarks “kind of woke [him] up,” adding she’s more “resilient, clever and compassionate than [he’d] understood.”
Hotb’s fellow co-hosts — including Al Poker and Savannah Guthrie — tried to clarify with Hotb what was actually the status of the couple’s relationship following the interview on Monday.
“Back together,” she said, appearing still baffled.
