“This is your life.
Married with four kids.
Get people out of jail.
Cover of Vogue.
Go to church every week with your family.
Dreams come true.”
This was a text message Kayne West sent to his wife Kim Kardashian West in 2019. Sadly, for America’s favorite couple, part of that “dream come true” is over.
After seven years, four kids, a bipolar disorder diagnosis, and one failed presidential run, Kim filed for divorce from Kanye on Friday. And while both parties seem to be making efforts to keep the split as amicable as possible, seeking joint custody and co-parenting of their kids, the end of KimYe is a tragic one.
Haters will say the iconic couple was just another drop in the bucket of fake celebrity marriages, doomed from the beginning, but while much of Kim’s life is very fake, her love for Kanye is not. And while many of Kanye’s harebrained ideas are indeed doomed from the beginning, marrying Kim was not. She was his “dream girl,” he said.
Numerous celebrity gossip rags are reporting it was Kayne’s 2020 presidential bid that “broke the camel’s back.” Kim felt betrayed when her husband shared their private deliberations over whether to abort their first child, North West, during a campaign event in South Carolina. “She had the pills in her hand,” he recalled in his emotional speech.
He praised Kim for choosing to save their child, but looking at his comments now, they seem to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. “So even if my wife were to divorce me after this speech, she brought North into this world,” he said. “She stood up and protected that child.”
Divorce is always tragic, but this one hits different. Angelina Jolie’s divorce from Brad Pitt seemed like it was just the next phase of their careers. Naomi Watts’s divorce from Liev Schreiber was because she wanted to travel more. Kim and Kanye were doing things differently.
Everything about Kanye’s recent conversion to Christianity seemed counter-cultural. He rapped about raising his children in the faith. He made headlines about asking his wife to dress modestly and pledged never to let their daughter on the cover of Playboy. Kim was getting people out of jail, and they were going to church every week as a family. Conservative Christians were rooting for them in a way that Brangenlina’s globe-trotting humanitarian work never could have inspired.
In a world where cohabitating and one-night stands are the new norm, KimYe was a beacon of hope that pursuing marriage and family could be fashionable again. They were “relationship goals” — not just for their fame and money and successful business ventures, but for their love for each other and their big family that stood out among a sea of revolving-door celebrity relationships.
We will never know the real reason for their split or their irreconcilable differences. We can’t pin the divorce on one party or the other. We can only pray for Kim, Kanye, and their four children. R.I.P., KimYe.
