After more than 20 years of marriage, six kids, plenty of inspiration and success and almost going through a divorce, TV Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and wife Dr. Rania “Rainbow” Edwards Barris are in a very happy place. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
Barris made that known in a public message to his wife.
“#grateful – my stunning and imperial @tharealrainbow you are beyond question the love of my life and #grateful is absolutely the word that definitively epitomizes how I feel to have you in my life as my wife and mother of my children,” he wrote. “Although our path is often obscured our destination is not. Thank you for dealing with me and our crazy life in the way that you have and that NO other woman EVER could have. I’m sorry that I haven’t always given you the smiles that you deserve but know that there will NEVER be a time when your happiness is not on my heart.”
He shared it with a photo of them cuddled up on a plane.
As mentioned, the couple were very close to calling it quits. Barris filed for divorce in 2019 from Rainbow, who is the inspiration for Tracee Ellis Ross’s character on Black-ish. He filed before that, doing so in 2014 before the couple decided to reconcile and withdrew the request. This time, they requested to dismiss the filing less than a year after his filing.
He talked about the divorce during an interview on rapper T.I.’s ExpediTIously podcast soon before actively seeking to dismiss it.
“If you look at sitcoms and our stories, we’re supposed to be okay. But 52 percent of marriages don’t work,” he said at the time. “It is the toughest thing I’ve ever been through in my life.”
“We didn’t know about therapy or really understand it. We didn’t know about really having the church or other married friends that would have given us the skeleton to make it in another sort of way,” he added. “So I feel like talking about that to a generation of people who might be going through what I’m going through, it makes them say, ‘Hey, there’s other people out there like me. Maybe we can make it. Maybe we can’t.’ I just want to be as real with my sh*t as possible.”
It’s nice to see that the couple still want to do the work continue on their journey. And though he didn’t have to share his feelings with the public, it’s nice to see people speak honestly about ways they’ve seen that they can improve in their relationships, and that reconciliation is possible.