Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, licensed to deceive: slap for traditional marriage?

Life is a poorly written script in which reality insists on ridiculing fiction. Of all possible plots, that of Will Smith y Jada Pinkett Smith It could well have left a bad desktop movie: a marriage that plays hiding with the truth while the foci illuminate them mercilessly. What began as a Hollywood fairy tale has ended up becoming a tragicomedy of sentimental tangles, confessions at the wrong time and a love that, rather than unwavering, seems unbreakable for pure stubbornness.

A marriage in beta version

Will and Jada have turned their relationship into a long -term show, a play in which the plot advances based on ambiguous scandals and reconciliations.

Love, like everything in Hollywood, is not so much a matter of feelings and narrative. And, for the moment, Will and Jada’s story are still profitable.

The problem with marriages in Hollywood is that they rarely work under the same rules as those of the rest of the mortals. In the show industry, fidelity is a lax concept, coexistence is an optional privilege and honesty with the public is just a matter of public relations. Will and Jada have perfected this model to the extreme: “separate lives, but not at all“, as if the marriage were a leasing contract with repurchase.

They have not shared a roof for years, but they are still a something that does not end up. They are not together, but not separately. They are not a conventional marriage, but they have not divorced either. If there is a word that could describe them, it is ambiguous, although exasperating it would also work.

Jada, who in recent times seems to have found in the televised confessions his favorite form of expression, dropped into his book Worthy that the relationship with Will was in pause since 2016. That is, while he accumulated Oscars and she collected romances, they followed being, technically, a couple. When asked if they would live together again, Jada responded with a disturbing tenderness: “When I am old, to take care of it“That is, until Will’s prostate decides otherwise, each one will continue at home.

Will and Jada’s relationship is based on his ability to dodge any conventional definition of marriage. The loyalty, for example, has been a flexible, adaptable concept, almost a philosophical challenge. The most popular case was that of August Alsina, a singer with whom Jada maintained a romance while his marriage was in “airplane mode“.

The peculiar of the matter was not the infidelity itself – something almost routine in the show – but the way in which the scandal was managed. First, August released the bomb: he had been with Jada and, according to him, with Will’s blessing. Then, the couple denied everything. Later, Jada was forced to admit it in his network Table Talk, that program in which privacy will die.

There, with Will as a resigned spectator, Jada talked about his entanglement (entanglement), a diffuse term that more than a relationship seemed a misunderstanding with too much physical contact. Will, with an expression that ranged between resignation and exhaustion, nodded. It was a glorious television moment: the actor who had built his career about the image of the sympathetic and charismatic type was reduced to a patient husband who attended impassive to his own public escarnio.

Will Smith’s tragicomedy

Will Smith, who had always been the prototype of the American hero, with his impeccable smile and his clean history of scandals, became, almost overnight, a Shakesperian character. First was the episode with August Alsina, then the slap came to Chris Rock in the Oscars, a gesture as impulsive as disastrous that turned his reputation into ashes.

Violence has no justification, but there is something symbolic in that blow: it was the reaction of a man who had endured too much. A man who had tried to keep the facade of a perfect marriage while his wife was responsible for deconstructing him in public. A man who, deep down, seemed to want to demonstrate that he still had a leading role in a story in which he had long relegated him to Secondary.

A marriage that does not divorce because he does not want

If there is something admirable in this story is the couple’s tenacity so as not to sign the divorce papers. Most marriages end when love, patience or money is exhausted. In the case of Will and Jada, the only thing that seems to keep them together is the pure inertia.

According to Jada, they never divorced because she promised Will that “I would never give it enough reason to do it” From Will Smith is one of the most generous that exist.

It is difficult to predict the future of this couple. They may continue like this, starring holders with contradictory statements and revealing unpublished chapters of their relationship in each interview. Someday they decide that, after all, traditional marriage is not that bad idea. Or maybe, in an unexpected turn, they end up divorcing when nobody cares.