How Jada Pinkett nearly ruined her marriage to Will Smith on her birthday.

Will Smith returns to the Table to discuss the breaking point in his marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith, as well as how the duo have redefined the terms “husband” and “wife” to match their special relationship.

Will recalled the moment he ‘snapped’ following Jada’s 40th birthday, blessing us with more details of their interesting 20-year relationship.

He spent three years planning for her a party with so many unique touches and emotional moments, believing he was doing something magnificent to mark her four decades on earth.

Will explained, “The day after her 37th birthday, I hired a team to orchestrate her 40th birthday.” He even had a documentary team discover footage of her late grandma. He even paid Mary J. Blige to perform. “It was going to be the thing that lifted her out of this midlife crisis, and it was going to be my deepest, most beautiful proclamation of love,” he added.

Smith had found and played voice recordings of Pinkett Smith’s late grandmother during the celebration. “She’s listening to these never-before-heard tapes of one of the dearest people she’s ever known in her life in front of all of these people,” he explained. “The whole time I’m like the little boy that wants Mommy to say everything was wonderful. She’s having a really difficult, emotional time.”

Instead, Jada said that she believed the whole thing was not authentic, and that it prompted her to cancel her plans for the next day, leaving Will ‘crushed.’

‘She’s like, “It’s my birthday!” She told me that the party was the most ridiculous display of my ego. Crushed, right?’ he said. ‘To this day I know I was crushed because it was true. It wasn’t a party for her. And when she called me on that, that’s when I snapped … the only time in [Willow’s] childhood she ever saw me snap.’

Pinkett Smith saw the occasion as a watershed moment. “That was a display, that moment of me having the courage to just say no, but now I had to have the courage to unravel it, and just realizing, ‘This next 40, I gotta do it my way,’” she added. “This next half has to be directed by my picture for myself.”

“There was so much that wasn’t me that I was living,” Pinkett Smith continued. “So much inauthenticity.”

The two realized they needed to work on their relationship seriously. Will revealed that he took two years away from the entertainment industry to concentrate on himself and his marriage. Despite tabloid stories to the contrary, they never discussed divorce.

Instead, they “broke up” and “reunited” with new restrictions inside their marriage. The pair no longer considers themselves to be married, preferring to refer to their relationship as something else. “It’s a life partnership,” Jada explained, “in the sense that we’ve created a foundation together that we know is for this lifetime.”