Charlize Theron has heard all the naysayers and their opinions about her and Sean Penn. But apparent;y she sees something the rest of them don’t. Why? Maybe it’s because she actually knows the guy, and has for a long time.

Charlize Theron told Esquire magazine recently:

“We’ve been friends for 20 years. He was married, I was in a long-term relationship, our spouses—not regularly, but we were in each other’s lives. I think our friendship stemmed from mutual respect—more on my end, because I really didn’t have a body of work 20 years ago, but my love and passion for making films—that was our common ground.”

But there was more to it than that. As Charlize Theron explains, she and Sean Penn are not just some acting couple who talk about their movies all the time.

“And also, Sean liked to have conversations outside of just making movies. That’s sometimes hard to find among friends here, and that’s where our friendship really blossomed. A lot of people want to tell you the answer to solving all of Africa’s problems from what they’ve seen on CNN. Sean is not that guy. When he started working in Haiti and I started working on the AIDS front in South Africa, we spent a lot of time talking about those worlds.”

What blows her away is that the friendship came first. Because of that, there is what she describes as a “weight to the relationship.”

“It is nice to be in something where the friendship came first. I’ve never had that. There’s a weight to the relationship already that I don’t think you have when you just meet somebody and enter a relationship. There’s a foundation of 20 years that the two of us have shared with each other in all these different ways that is really the foundation of something that has brought a lot of beautiful things into my life. We get so stuck in wanting to predict the future that we forget the moment that we’re in. And the moment that we’re in is just really good. It’s really good, really nice.”

So, what about marriage? Does Charlize Theron think that is in the works for her and Sean Penn?

“The marriage thing is always so strange to me. I love the possibility of anything, but I’m really enjoying myself and the everyday moment and how that coincides with my son and my life and my friends. I’m a very, very, very lucky girl. Very lucky. He’s hot. He is hot. How do you say that in an interview? You’re a 40-year-old woman sounding like a 16-year-old. There’s something beautiful about that, but you lack the articulation of really saying what it’s like when somebody walks into your life and makes you see something that you really never thought you’d be able to see. If somebody had said to me, ‘This is what it will be,’ I would’ve said, ‘F–k off.’ As you can see, it makes me smile.”