Transcription
[Music] For our daily cancellation today, we must cancel Will Smith. We could cancel him because he hasn't made a good movie in 20 years, but his filmography isn't the topic of contention today.
Our focus now is on Smith's recent interview in GQ, where he discusses the beauty and wonder of being in an open marriage. Will Smith is in an open marriage with his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Though it appears that the marriage was initially opened against his will.
Um, the couple infamously sat across from each other for a Red Table Talk on Facebook last year, where they awkwardly, in front of the cameras, discussed an affair that Jada had years before. Um, I've never been able to watch more than a minute of this conversation because the cringe factor is so overwhelming. But just to refresh our memories, here's a little bit of that discussion. Watch this.
[Music]
"During that time, launched into an interaction with August."
"What do you feel like, um, you were looking for?"
"I just wanted to feel good. It had been so long since I felt good, and it was really a joy to just help heal somebody."
"Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with my codependency, which is another thing that I had to learn to break in this cycle. Just that idea of needing to fix and being drawn to people that need help, whether it's your health or whether it's your addictions. There's something about that childhood trauma, um, that feels as though it can be fixed through fixing people."
"Yeah, well, that's one way to put it. She, she was not starting an affair. She was, as Will puts it, launching into an interaction."
There's some nice euphemistic language that you might want to try if you're a dirty rotten cheater caught in the act. "Oh no, honey, I wasn't cheating. I was really just, I was having an interaction. You know, we kind of launched into this interaction. There was an exchange, you might say. An understanding was reached. A meeting of the minds, and end of other parts."
Of course, I'm imagining the cheater making the excuses for themselves here. But actually, Will Smith is the one providing the euphemisms to the wife who cheated on him. And for her part, she's a little bit more direct because he asks, "What were you looking for when you cheated on me?" And she says, "I just wanted to feel good." And he says, "Oh, okay." As if that sheds comforting new light on the situation.
But obviously, she cheated because it made her feel good. That's why any cheater cheats. That's why any bad person does anything bad. That's the motivating factor behind all sin. You do it because it makes you feel good, and you have prioritized feeling good over all other concerns, especially your commitments, your promises, your moral obligations. That's why every bad person does bad things.
So that was last year. Now Will Smith is in GQ talking about his free and open marriage and how happy and loving it all is. Reading from the Daily Wire report, it says, "Jada never believed in conventional marriage," Smith told GQ. "Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship, so she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up. There were significant, endless discussions about what is relational perfection," Smith recalled. "And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was that choice, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection."
The pair have given each other trust and freedom within their relationship, Page Six noted. "Since marriage can't be a prison," Will Smith said, "I don't suggest our road for anybody. I don't suggest this road for anybody. But the experience is that the freedoms that we've given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love."
It was a lot of that was quite incoherent, but hopefully, you basically got the idea. The highest definition of love is betrayal, he says. Or rather, it's, it's doing what makes you feel good individually. In other words, the highest love in a marriage is self-interest. That is what Will Smith proposes. And what makes it all the sadder and more pitiable is that you can tell he doesn't really believe a word of what he's saying.
This is how these open marriages work. There's usually one member of the couple who feels betrayed and is being betrayed. They have to convince themselves that they're not being betrayed. When you listen to the stories of couples in open marriages, you always hear either the husband or the wife say, "Yeah, you know, my spouse decided that it'd be a good idea for them to sleep with other people, and, you know, I was utterly and completely devastated and destroyed by it at first. But over time, I've learned to accept it, and I'm really so happy now." When I'm not locking myself in the bathroom and weeping uncontrollably five times a day.
An open marriage is, after all, betrayal as a lifestyle. And betrayal doesn't become any less traitorous just because it's done in the open. That actually makes it worse, if anything, because now you've enlisted your spouse to be an accomplice in your infidelity. You don't even have the decency to cheat in secret and save them the indignity and the shame of pretending that they're okay with it.
An open marriage is also an oxymoron. It's a contradiction in terms. It's like open borders. If you open a border, then it's not a border anymore. If you open a marriage, that's not a marriage anymore. A marriage, by definition, is closed. A marriage can't be opened for the same reason that, you know, you can't build a house without walls or a roof. The walls and the roof are the whole point of the house. Get rid of those, and now you're homeless.
A blanket laid out on the pavement is not an open house or a new house or a consensually non-walled house. It's just not a house. It's a non-house. It's literally the opposite of a house. And if we start calling that a house, then we haven't expanded the definition of a house, but instead, we've done away with the very concept of a house entirely. And I think that would be a very stupid thing to do, because houses are very useful things to have.
Just like marriages. Marriage has its own walls and its own roof, and it's within those walls and under that roof that your family must be formed and maintained. Monogamy is but one of the bricks used to build this structure. Uh, procreativity is another, which also has been largely abandoned by our culture. But these building blocks are the only things that make a marital union distinct from any other kind of union. They're the whole point of marriage.
To decide on open marriages is to tear down the walls of your house and take shelter in the rubble. And the fact that the adultery is mutually agreed upon and consensual doesn't make it any less adulterous or any better at all, really. Our culture has developed this idea that it's okay to commit an evil action if we're open and honest about it. But that so-called honesty is born from your pride and your lack of concern for how your wickedness will hurt those closest to you.
At least a man who hides his affair has acknowledged first that it is base and shameful, and second, that it's harmful to his family. But somebody who advertises infidelity is a sociopath with no shame. He's much further from redemption, I think, in his marriage, much further from healing, than the guy who claims that he's staying late for work so that he can meet his mistress at a Motel 6.
I mean, it's all bad in the end, of course. And that's why fidelity is the much better course. That's where you have a real marriage, a loving marriage, a marriage that is actually a marriage. And that is why Will Smith today, much like his marriage, I must say, is cancelled.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that clip from The Matt Walsh Show. If you did, go ahead and hit that subscribe button right down there so you can stay up to date on all of our future content.