Keith Boykin | Posted July 17, 2008 12:05 PM

Once upon a time, a celebrity couple that admitted to an "open marriage" might never work in Hollywood again.

And back in the quaint old days of yore, a married baseball star might ruin his image if he were "caught" in a strip club.

And that's to say nothing of a female celebrity who marries a man who everyone knows thinks is gay.

But those ideas are so 1990s. These days, some of the biggest A-list stars seem to be redefining the whole institution of marriage. Or are they simply opening up a window to what marriage really looks like in America?

Will and Jada

Last week, Hollywood A-lister Will Smith revealed that he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith have an agreement that they can have sex with other people as long as they inform each other first.

"Our perspective is, you don't avoid what's natural," Smith told Britain's Daily Mail. "You're going to be attracted to people. In our marriage vows, we didn't say 'forsaking all others.' The vow that we made was that you will never hear that I did something after the fact."

The 36-year-old actor says his 7-year marriage is solid but demonstrates remarkable candor in discussing the rules. "If it came down to it, then one can say to the other, 'Look, I need to have sex with somebody. I'm not going to if you don't approve of it -- but please approve of it,'" he explained.

Star and Al

In contrast to Smith's openness, Star Jones's soon-to-be ex-husband Al Reynolds told CelebTV.com this week that he still loves his ex and denied persistent rumors about his sexuality.

"I am not a homosexual," he told a reporter. "It really is kind of upsetting to me that that's where people would go as it relates to my sexuality because this has affected my professional life, this has affected my personal life. And if anyone knew the damage that it has caused me they would understand why I'm very aggressive about this."

Reynolds has learned a lot from his lawyer spouse. Star Jones was always smart enough to say that she knew everything she needed to know about her husband. As far as I know, she never denied that he slept with another man before. Nor did Reynolds himself this week.

Listen closely to what Reynolds did and did not say. Reynolds was asked point blank: "Are you gay?" His response was not yes or no, but "I am not a homosexual," an odd choice of phrase that seems to leave open the possibility that he might have slept with men in the past, or that he might be bisexual. Even Reynolds admitted that the rumors would continue on. With answers like that, it's no wonder.

Alex and Cindy and Madonna

Meanwhile, the biggest celebrity feud of the past few weeks has pitted New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez against soon-to-be ex-wife Cynthia.

A-Rod ran into trouble last year when the married baseball player was caught at a Toronto strip club with a woman not his wife. But the couple stayed together, had a child and continued to smile for the cameras when necessary.

Then came the rumors about Madonna. C-Rod finally left A-Rod after reports that her 32-year-old hubby was under the spell of 49-year-old pop icon Madonna. The story was reported all over the New York tabloids, but A-Rod continues to play for the Yankees. With a $28 million salary this year, he's the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball, and management isn't about to dump him for his off-the-field behavior.

Marriage Ain't What They Tell You

We've seen these scenes play out over and over, from one celebrity couple to another. Russell Simmons and his wife Kimora, Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook, Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. Celebrity divorces make for great headlines, but divorce, infidelity, and homosexuality don't necessarily end a career. Nor should they.

Despite all the conservative complaints about liberal social policies destroying the family, the truth is that the divorce rate has actually been declining over the past four decades. The divorce rate in 2005 (per 1,000 people) was 3.6 -- the lowest rate since 1970, and down from 5.3 in 1981, according to the Associated Press and DivorceMagazine.com.

Fewer than 4 out of every 1,000 marriages ended in divorce. Of course, divorces has become far more common and accepted these days, but the real numbers hardly sound like a national crisis. Abused women are getting divorced to save their lives. Some couples are getting divorced because they can't stand each other, and others were never meant to be together in the first place.

My own parents divorced when I was in elementary school, and I fully supported my mom's decision to leave. Marriage is not for everyone, and a bad marriage is for no one. Modern culture has liberated us from the foolishness that couples have to stay together forever, even when they clearly need to be apart.

But conservative blowhards still don't get it. Ironically, some of the most conservative states have the highest divorce rates. Excluding the marriage and divorce capital of Nevada, the two states with the highest divorce rates are Arkansas (6.3) and Wyoming (5.3).

In contrast, the very liberal District of Columbia has the lowest divorce rate (1.7), followed by the liberal state of Massachusetts (2.2), according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

What's changed in the past 40 years is not just the rise of divorce but rather the decline of marriage as fewer and fewer couples are walking down the aisle together. In 1970, 72 percent of the population was married. Today it's 59 percent.

Whether or not these celebrities are encouraging a new culture around marriage, it's increasingly clear that they're reflecting the realities of marriage in modern America. Not as many people are getting married, people are waiting longer to get married when they do, and people are not afraid to get divorced if things go badly wrong.

The celebrities are not necessarily out of the mainstream. Instead, their successes and failures at marriage reveal what's going on all throughout the country. Marriage ain't what they told you it is. It's what we choose to make it.

Some people enter into "fake marriages" to fool the military, immigration officials, or even their own families and friends. Some people take up "open marriages" that allow one or both partners to stray from time to time. Some people stay married to their gay or bisexual spouses rather than starting over from scratch. And many people -- many more than we want to admit -- are "cheating" in their marriages at the same time they're preaching about the sanctity of the institution.

In reality, marriage means different things to different people. It's not just the Hollywood myth or the storybook romance. Sometimes -- oftentimes in the past -- it's just a business deal. Sometimes it's just about sex. Sometimes it's just about the need for intimacy. And many times it's about love.

If Will and Jada, Star and Al, A-Rod and C-Rod can help us to see what really goes on in marriage, they will have provided an enormous public service.

Keith Boykin is editor of The Daily Voice, a host of the BET J TV show My Two Cents, and a regular political commentator on CNN and MSNBC.