Jada Pinkett Smith's Advice For Successful Relationships
"Your Relationship Is Not Your Identity": Jada Pinkett Smith on Modern Love and Open Relationships
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PS: Do you have any advice on dealing with emotional insecurities within a relationship? Like overthinking and balancing that emotional world? Especially as women?
JPS: Self-love is a really deep journey — to me, it's about emotional independence. You got to know you're okay with or without someone and, usually, whatever someone else is going through has nothing to do with you.
I think that relationships are a place for learning. It's really a place to learn about yourself, how to clear up our insecurities, and how to find those places within ourselves that we have to learn to stand alone. We need to learn how to make our own selves happy, not looking for someone to lift us up in some way. We have to be our own biggest cheerleader. What I have learned is that I've had to really strengthen my connection with my higher power and that everything I love, including myself, must go up through the higher power and then disperse out.
We depend too much, specifically women. We think that our relationships are our identity. So depending on how our partners treat us, that says who we are, that says the quality of person that we are. So we're asking somebody to illuminate our light when they're trying to find their own. People are out here just trying to feel good in all the pain they're swimming in, right? And so it actually is an unfair request to expect someone to be something for us because people are really just trying to figure this sh*t out the best that they can. Sometimes it's good enough and sometimes it ain't, but at the end of the day you've got to know that you are the treasure.
Sometimes it takes really having to sit in that pain by yourself and be alone to find that strength within yourself and find the jewel of your heart, and of your spirit, that makes you who you are. It's not dependent on that man or that woman. If you depend on that, you will be failed every time and it's hard. It's a painful one, it's a painful journey, but it is the journey of freedom. And when we love ourselves in that way, we can love others so much more deeply. And you invite so much love in.