Will Smith says Jada Pinkett Smith’s revelations about their marriage ‘kind of woke him up.’

“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.

In an email to The New York Times, from a profile on Pinkett Smith, the Oscar-winning actor says the book “kind of woke him up.”

Smith explained that the 52-year-old actress had “lived a life more on the edge than he had realized” and that she is more “resilient, clever, and compassionate than he had understood,” according to The Times.

“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in,” Smith wrote. “And you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”

In an interview with Today‘s Hoda Kotb on Oct. 11, the Matrix and Girls Trip actress said she and her husband separated in 2016 and “live separately” from each other, despite putting on a public image that they have been a unified couple since they married in 1997.

Pinkett Smith went on to say that she kept the separation a secret as a result of “not being ready yet” and “still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership” with each other in terms of how they presented to the public.

“We hadn’t figured that out,” she said.

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