The Timeline Of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Relationship Puts Everything Into Perspective

Let’s go all the way back to the start. Will and Jada met for the first time in 1994, when Jada auditioned to play one of Will’s girlfriends on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She didn’t get the role, but as we all know, she did eventually get the leading man.

When Will first encountered Jada, he was already married to Sheree Zampino, the mother of his oldest child Trey. He didn’t start seeing Jada until splitting from her, though. One story says he called up Jada and asked if she was dating anyone, and when she said no he said, “Cool, you’re seeing me now.”

A couple of years later, and there was a pregnancy. Unfortunately, this wasn’t good news for Jada, who didn’t want to be tied down. She remembered on her show Red Table Talk in June 2019, “I never wanted to get married. But my mother was like, ‘You have to get married’ — she’s so old school — and Will wanted a family. So I said, ‘All right, maybe it’s something I should do.’”

The wedding was far from the happiest day of Jada’s life. She recollected in a bombshell Red Table Talk episode in October 2018, “I was so upset I had to have a wedding… I went crying down the freaking aisle, crying the whole way.” Being pregnant at the time didn’t help, either.

But Jada went through with the wedding vows nevertheless, and gave birth to their child — Jaden — not long afterwards. And then, as the new millennium dawned, Will became one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He had hit after hit: Men in Black, Ali, Enemy of the State.

Entertainment media outlets were very interested in how Will and Jada’s marriage functioned under such pressure. Will offered to Vanity Fair magazine in 1999 that the answer was, “Complete submission. The way that Jada and I apply that to our relationship is: we sacrifice ourselves completely for the other person.”

Will went on, “I’ll come home from work and give her a massage. She knows I’ve worked all day, and the next day she wants so bad to do something for me. And vice versa. Complete submission.” It sounded great on paper, of course… but did things really work like that?

It seemed that wasn’t necessarily the case. Throughout the next decade, rumor started to spread that Will and Jada were actually in an open relationship. Will outright said to the Daily Mail newspaper in February 2005, “Our perspective is, you don’t avoid what’s natural. You’re going to be attracted to people.”

Will went on, “In our marriage vows, we didn’t say ‘forsaking all others.’ The vow that we made was that you will never hear that I did something after the fact.” He also admitted that during the filming of his movie Hitch he’d been attracted to his co-star Eva Mendes.

However, an interview with Jada later on that year indicated that maybe wasn’t the case after all. Jada told Women’s Health in November, “Will and I both make sacrifices. Him being famous and rich and handsome and monogamous — that’s a big old [challenge] for the both of us. Who said monogamy is easy?”

Jada went on, being very honest, “Will and I talk about it all the time. But we love each other enough. I think women make a big mistake in thinking that a man comes with this beautifully wrapped package, and what’s in it is pretty much the answer to all their dreams.”

Jada’s final thoughts on that particular issue were, “That’s a lot of responsibility to put on somebody, and I think a lot of times we’re too afraid to put that responsibility on ourselves. Happiness is our responsibility; we can be as happy or as miserable as we choose to be.”

The interview revealed quite a lot of details about the Smiths’ marriage. Jada mused towards the end, “As long as I’m honest with him and he knows that I love him, he couldn’t care less about anything else. If I decide one minute that I want to fly to the moon and build a house on Mars or whatever, he’s down for it. He’s down for whatever.”

In later interviews, reporters curiously probed Jada about her marriage to Will. For example, in a June 2009 article for Red Book magazine about how she “kept the passion burning,” Jada told the interviewer, “Will’s really smart. He’s very conscious and present.” But he apparently hadn’t always been like that.

Jada said that being “conscious and present” was “something we’ve learned to be together. There’s a certain amount of safety you have to create for someone to feel like they can be open to you in that way. That’s something we forget in marriages and relationships — they have to be places of safety, because they’re where you are most vulnerable.”

Jada went on, “If you’re not allowed to be safe, I don’t know if you can reach the depths of connection that support commitment. You can be committed to somebody because of ego: I said I was going to be with this joker for the rest of my life, so I’m just going to do it. Or you can be committed because you have a deeply rooted connection.”

Asked how she kept that connection, Jada said she arranged trips out into nature for her and Will. Their most recent trip only took an hour, but, “We were both replenished and so happy and connected in that one hour. It doesn’t take a lot of time. Once again, it’s just being aware and present enough to know what that other person wants.”

Jada said that “part of the reason we’ve been able to be together the way that we are for so long,” was that she and Will were “constantly surprising each other.” She explained, “In relationships you have to be elastic. If I say ‘black,’ Will says ‘white.’ That’s just how we work.”

Jada also said, perhaps a little more tellingly, “You might have an idea in your mind of what a marriage is supposed to be, and you’re driving, driving, driving toward this ideal picture. But you have to be open to the fact that your relationship is meant to be something else.”

The following year, in May 2010, both Will and Jada sat down with Oprah Winfrey and talked about their relationship some more. One of the odder revelations was that they had what was termed a “marriage business plan.” Will said, “There has to be a vision. Like, why are we together?”

Jada said she also thought her and Will had been brought together by some greater force. She told Oprah, “We found that our purpose for being together reaches far outside of our relationship. I really believe that the higher power put us together for a purpose that’s outside of us.”

Jada went on, “I get people on the street that pull me up and want mostly to talk about my relationship, my marriage. How I’ve inspired people to look at how they raise their children differently or the efforts they put forth in their relationship.” But things were about to change.

Come August 2011 a rumor started spreading, and it was a very problematic one. According to gossip, Jada had been getting very close to her male co-star Marc Anthony on the set of the TV show Hawthorne. And not only was she obviously married, but he was, too. And it was to another A-lister… Jennifer Lopez.

Jada and Will quickly released a statement saying it wasn’t true. On August 23 they told the world via People magazine, “Although we are reluctant to respond to these types of press reports, the rumors circulating about our relationship are completely false. We are still together, and our marriage is intact.”

But even once that rumor was put to bed, others persisted. The question that became loudest of all was whether Jada and Will had a special arrangement? Eventually it became impossible for the Smiths to ignore. In August 2013 Jada made a long and rather angry Facebook post about the issue.

Jada wrote that even though, “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 wanted to make clear, “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.”

Two years later, in 2015, Jada seemed to clarify that a little. She told Howard Stern that June, “I’m not the kind of woman that believes that a man’s not gonna be attracted to other women. It’s just not realistic. And just because your man is attracted to another woman doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. And it doesn’t mean he’s gonna act on it.”

But it was also that year that a now very well-known third party came into Will and Jada’s orbit. This was August Alsina, 22 years old at the time Jada met him. It also happened to be around this time that Will had to speak out against speculation.

But, of course, that wasn’t remotely the end of it. People began to wonder more about Jada and August, even if just what might be going on wasn’t clear. In August’s “Nunya” music video, released April 2019, the text message “Koren <3” appears. Koren is Jada’s middle name.

That scandalous story pretty much never left the public consciousness. But Jada had some other things to deal with. In 2021 she starting talking more about the alopecia diagnosis she’d gotten a few years prior, alopecia being a condition that causes you to lose your hair. That year, she decided to just shave her head.

The year 2022 would put the couple square and center in the spotlight. Jada posted to Instagram “This is a season for healing and I’m here for it,” but went no more in-depth than that. However, an insider said of her to Us Weekly, “She’s a strong woman, an opinionated woman, and she can fight her own battles. But she will stand by him.”

But the rumor mill is still in motion. On April 19, 2022, OK! magazine reported that “tension has allegedly grown between the pair” and Will and Jada could even be headed for “one of the ugliest [separations] in showbiz history.” And an “insider” apparently told Heat magazine that the pair were “barely speaking.”

Could it really happen? A split after so long? Well, neither individual has given any indication that they’re actually “barely speaking” — or are on terms anything like that. Still, as some particularly dramatic moments have demonstrated for all to see, truly anything can happen in the world of showbiz.