Willow Smith opened up about being polyamorous on the April 28 episode of Red Table Talk, the roundtable talk show she co-hosts with her mom, Jada Pinkett Smith, and her grandmother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris.
“With polyamory, I feel like the main foundation is the freedom to be able to create a relationship style that works for you,” Willow said, according to BuzzFeed. “Not just stepping into monogamy because that’s what everyone around you says is the right thing to do.”
Polyamory, for the unfamiliar, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the state or practice of having more than one open romantic relationship at a time.”
Willow’s mom, Jada, said to her in response, “I think anything goes, as long as the intentions are clear—more to yourself than anything. I know that there’s a lot of beauty that sits outside of the conventional boxes.”
She continued, “Most people are practicing monogamy because they feel they have no other choice. We all know that most people out here do an ethical non-monogamy any damn way.”
This ties into something Willow said earlier in the discussion: “Doing research into polyamory, the main reason why divorces happen is infidelity.” And indeed, according to a 2014 study by the American Psychological Association, 20% to 40% of divorces are caused by infidelity.
In the chat, Willow Smith was also sure to debunk a common myth about polyamory: that it’s all about s€x. “Let’s say you haven’t always been the person wanting s€x all the time, but your partner is,” she said, per BuzzFeed.
“Are you going to be the person to say, ‘Just because I don’t have these needs, you can’t have them, either’? That’s one of the reasons why I was interested in poly, because I was introduced to it through kind of a nonsexual lens…. In my friend group, I’m the only polyamorous person and I have the least s€x out of all of my friends.”
