"It never even crossed my mind," she says.
Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are serious about their wedding vows!
On a new episode of Jada's Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk, the couple of more than 20 years reveal why they never considered the possibility of divorce. The reason has nothing to do with a lack of marital woes -- in fact, around Jada's 40th birthday they went through a tough time.
"I think the turning point in our relationship happened when I turned 40," Jada, now 47, says. "That's when I had a midlife crisis."
"Your 40th birthday was my low point," Will, 50, agrees.
After going through a three-year process of planning a blowout bash for his wife's 40th birthday -- complete with recordings from her grandmother and a performance by Mary J. Blige -- Jada felt that the party he threw wasn't really for her at all.
"She's like, 'It's my birthday,' and she told me that the party was the most ridiculous display of my ego," Will confesses. "Crushed, right? And to this day I know I was crushed because it was true. It wasn't a party for her. When she called me on that, that's when I snapped and... I snapped in front of Willow -- it was the only time in her childhood she ever saw me snap -- and I saw her look and Willow starts crying and I'm like, 'Baby, I'm sorry' and she's like, 'Just figure it out! You guys, please, just figure it out.'"
The birthday faux-pas made Jada reexamine her life and think about what she had to do differently in the future.
"This next half has to be directed by my picture for myself," she recalls thinking. "... There was so much that wasn't me that I was living. So much inauthenticity."
Though, according to Will, the couple had to "destroy" their marriage to move forward, divorce never crossed their minds.
"To me, it was over. But divorce was never even an option," he says. "... I was reading in the tabloids that we were getting divorced and all that stuff. It was never even a consideration."
"It never even crossed my mind," she concurs.
"Because I had been divorced before I wasn't getting divorced again. Divorce wasn't an option," he reiterates. "There was a time when I was scared that she might."
For Jada, it was never about divorce; it was simply that she had given too much of herself for too long.
"I put in too much. Period," she says. "Why do that? Why create all that disruption? I told Will from the gate, I said let me tell you something, 'If you marry me, know this: we're gonna be together. We're going to be under the same roof'... for me personally, I knew that there was no reason that he and I would ever [divorce]."
Will was "devastated even worse than a divorce," but was refocused on rebuilding their relationship with new rules.
"You really have to go your separate ways to figure out your stuff. You've got to be strong enough and understand clearly what you're in search of, what it is you want, what it is you don't want," Jada agrees. "... You have to go your separate ways and get out of each other's way to really see yourself. So I had to go away, gain my strength as Jada again. Not Mommy, not wife, Jada Koren."
"I was not going to fail in this marriage," Will emphatically says. "But I shut down for two entire years to see what was I doing wrong."
Both members of the couple had to work on accepting each other -- flaws and all -- as well as being honest about what they needed out of a relationship.
"I used to think that if you don't need somebody then you can't love them, and if you're not needed, then you're not loved. That was a false belief I had," Jada admits. "I can't expect somebody to love me more than me. If you don't like being with you, what the hell makes you think somebody else wants to be with you? ... We expect other people to do the work for us."
On the show, the couple went on to describe why they don't describe themselves as married anymore. The word, they agree, simply doesn't encompass all they are to each other.
"It's a life partnership, in the sense that we've created a foundation together that we know is for this lifetime," Jada explains.
"We have devoted ourselves to each other in a spiritual sense," Will agrees. "Spiritual, emotional. It's like whatever she needs, she can count on me for the rest of her life."
"It gives us the freedom to create a different context for ourselves to not have to live up to the expectation of what people consider marriage to be," Jada adds.
"There's nothing that could happen that we won't be together and love each other," Will shares. "It's not because we're just saying it, it's because we've cracked each other's heads wide open and we woke up the next day and high-fived and kept going. I think that's the part where we set each other free."
"What you are is the best friend I've ever had. You're the best partner I've ever had," Will tells Jada. "... When you go to sleep at night knowing you have an unbreakable bond, an unbreakable friendship, an unbreakable connection. That's how you want to go to sleep every night."
"I've never met anybody like you and I knew if I wasn't with you, I'd be searching in vain for the rest of my life," Will gushes.
ET caught up Jada earlier this month, where she delved more into how they've made their marriage work. Watch the video below to see what she had to say:
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