In One Quote, Jada Pinkett Smith Gave the Badass Marriage Advice Everyone Should Hear

You know when a sentence starts with "Here's the deal, Howard..." it's going to be worth hearing.

Jada Pinkett Smith is known for being an outspoken badass in the art of sex, parenting — and even the uncool topic of marriage. Sure enough, in an interview Wednesday with Howard Stern, the actress gave us all a dose of real talk on the subject:

"You've gotta trust who you're with. And at the end of the day, right, I'm not here to be anybody's watcher. I'm not his watcher. He's a grown man."

A spouse, not a babysitter: Smith's comments are another candid example of the marital values she and Will Smith have espoused for years. The two have faced cheating rumors and chatter about their "open marriage," something she hasn't denied but rather consistently responds to with nuanced explanation.

"At the end of the day, Will is his own man. I'm here as his partner, but he is his own man," she told HuffPost Live in 2013. "He has to decide who he wants to be, and that's not for me to do for him. Or vice versa."

That works, of course, because they trust each other and have realistic expectations of one another as humans. She added, to Stern:

"I'm not the kind of woman that believes a man is not going to be attracted to other women. I'm just not that girl. It's just not realistic. And just because your man is attracted to another woman, does not mean he doesn't love you. That's not what it means. 

That realistic approach is a healthy one, and one more people could use to heed. A survey of nearly 100,000 people cited by the 2013 relationship book The Normal Bar found that only 39% of women and 53% of men reported to fully trust their partners. 

But the trust is key to staying together, as Elizabeth Banks also echoed recently. She and her husband have crushes on other people, because they're human. The key is they choose to stay together and trust one another.

As Smith said, you never want to be anybody's watcher.

h/t Us Weekly