Their fix may seem unconventional to most—Jada even prefacing their 2018 confessional with “I would say to individuals, ‘Do not try this at home,'”—but they saw it as the only solution.
“We essentially had to destroy our marriage,” Will said. “[Jada] was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ and to me… it was over, but divorce was never even an option.” That process had been painful enough the first time around. “Because I had been divorced before I wasn’t getting divorced again,” he insisted. “Divorce wasn’t an option.”
Jada agreed that while their union was riddled with cracks, they weren’t at a true breaking point. “I had never seen a divorce lawyer. Like that was never—it never crossed my mind,” she said. Rather, she was focused on really delving into what it would take for her to feel she was approaching the back half of her life on her terms. “There was so much that wasn’t me that I was living. So much inauthenticity,” she explained.
And the only viable solution she saw was time apart. “You have to go your separate ways and get out of each other’s way to really see yourself,” she said. “I had to go away, gain my strength as Jada again—not Mommy, not wife.”
