“Will really believed, ‘OK. If I make it big in this world, I can provide everything for you and the family,’” Pinkett Smith says. “For him, that is the biggest love language: To protect and provide.”

They don’t care each-others?

Pinkett Smith says her husband’s focus on providing for the family stood in the way of the “masterpiece of connection” she was trying to create. Last week, Pinkett Smith shocked fans when she revealed that she and Will Smith have been separated since 2016. Keeping the news of the separation private gave her time to work through “a lot of anger and resentment,” she says.

“I never got the relationship I wanted,” she explains. But, she adds, “It’s funny about Will and I – even if the marriage wasn’t working, there was still this level of friendship and deep connection between us … and I didn’t want to make a bloodbath of our separation.”

In the new memoir, Worthy, Pinkett Smith writes about her marriage, her career in Hollywood, her upbringing in Baltimore and her friendship with the late rapper Tupac Shakur. She also chronicles her struggle with depression and her efforts to better understand and accept herself.

“At the end of the day, what I had come to realize in this time of separation is that there was no ‘masterpiece of connection’ to make without me having a relationship with myself,” she says. “I couldn’t look to Will to be the substitute for my relationship to myself, an intimate relationship with myself.”