Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s marriage and divorce, as evidenced by Kim’s 5,425 Instagram posts.

2012 has been a cosmically significant year for Kim Kardashian: it was then that two of the most important relationships in the starlet’s life began. This is the year she and rapper Kanye West became a couple, and it’s also when she started posting on a little photo-sharing app called Instagram.

Kardashian reportedly filed for divorce last Friday, marking the end of her and West as an official unit. Her Instagram, where she has over 200 million subscribers, will live. While she’s tried other apps, including her own, over the years, it seems unchallengeable to say that Instagram is Kardashian’s primary platform, and that will only be truer by the end of her. reality show this year. And it’s weird to think that so far her account and her relationship with West overlap so completely – there’s never been a Kimye who didn’t exist on Kim’s Instagram, and Kimye’s Instagram. Kim never existed apart from Kimye. Right now, there are 5,424 articles on Kim’s page that chronicle her entire relationship with West (the 5,425^e, posted this morning, Heralds of the Post-Kimye Era), which means half of the couple’s tales of their history are just sitting there, waiting to be discovered by anyone who wants to scroll to the start of their grid. . Well, I did that, and I have some conclusions.

I expect all of us to, on occasion, after hearing about a breakup between a normal person, take to one or both parties’ social media accounts to make a little sleuth. – when did this happen, and were there any clues we missed? But doing that kind of amateur sleuth work on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page is a whole different task. Even the happiest people I know in real life haven’t posted nearly 5,000 times. Remember the Library of Congress plan to archive every public tweet? He dropped that project, I have to imagine, because it was too many posts for one person or a team of people to sift through, and that’s kind of how I feel, looking at the 5424s of Kim.

Anyway, I’m going. Did Kim posted fewer photos of Kanye in 2020, as the couple’s marital issues seemingly escalated? Was she less effusive? Was he more grumpy? Were are all the signs there? Aside from the appearance that COVID appears to have barely impacted Kim, Kanye, and the extended lives of the Kardashian clan throughout the pandemic, which we already knew, a close reading of Kim’s past year’s posts is proving inconclusive. There have been little recent stories that haven’t escaped the internet’s attention, like the post on December 22 in which Kim wasn’t wearing a wedding ring:

There was also the January 8 post in which the ring was still missing in action, which ended up mysteriously disappearing from its stream. The most recent reference to Kanye appears to be a later January post in which Kim wears Yeezys, Kanye’s sneaker line, which some sources say should be taken as a sign of relaxation between the two. The most recent photo or mention of Kanye, however, is on November 22, when Kim posted a photo and caption congratulating him on Kanye’s 10th anniversary. My beautiful dark twisted fantasy, one of his most acclaimed albums:

She also included photos of a note Kanye sent her, which later became the inspiration for some song lyrics on the album, before the two became a couple. Soft. Later in the holiday season, Kanye doesn’t appear in any photos posted from Christmas or a trip to Tahoe around the same time. (While we’re focusing on her grid here, Kardashian fans and professional watchers are also trying to read the tea leaves in her Instagram Stories, the first place she’s allegedly “broken her silence on social media.”)

But these are only the last few months – were there any signs it was going longer than that? Signs that could be seen on Instagram, I mean, rather than reports of family disputes over Kanye’s presidential run and more specifically a speech he gave in which he told a personal story about Kanye’s presidential run. ‘once he and his wife considered abortion. It’s hard to say. June was certainly a boon of tributes to him and their wedding: she posted one for Father’s Day and one for Kanye’s birthday (“Happy Birthday to my King”) and another for the sixth birthday. marriage of the couple:

Truth be told, one of the reasons it’s hard to say for sure whether Kanye has or hasn’t backed down on Kim’s Instagram is that Kim never really posted so many pictures of Kanye to begin with. One of the first came in May 2012, just months after Kim’s very first Instagram post, when she uploaded a photo of herself, her future husband, her brother Rob and a Kelly Osbourne to the lavender hair drinking a watermelon:

Kim and Kanye are two people who would end up respectively renting a private island for an important birthday during a pandemic and buying a hologram and bringing it to that island, therefore: humble beginnings. But that sipping a watermelon is far from turning your home into an opulent “spider’s web experience” for the Halloween pandemic says more about Kim’s trajectory from reality TV star to billionaire (maybe?) list only on his relationship with Kanye, although the two are not fully independent. If anything, this watermelon photo is one of dozens of cute posts over the years that made it seem like she and Kanye really cared about each other – her feed is inundated with photos. of them captioned with single-heart emojis (to signify true love), ones where she calls him her boo and bae and #MCM (man crush Monday), and there’s also plenty of evidence that he doesn’t. couldn’t keep his hands on his famous butt:

Before the carousel feature existed, Kim was posting five love photos of them in the timeline in a row without shame. Her posts lately had been more commercial: Throughout 2020, she’s been promoting a “Mrs. “West” makeup line inspired by her wedding in 2014 – in Kardashianland, decoupling the professional and the personal can be nearly impossible. But as recently as January 2020, she spouted out a custom-designed necklace that sold their love as thoroughly as ever. Did things escalate so quickly that a year later she was preparing for a divorce? Or did Kimye just have the sad 2020 that many of us have done under all the tricks except with an island vacation and six-figure holograms of missing loved ones as a backdrop?

What I finally realized was that Kanye was never the central draw here. Kim’s Instagram is and always has been primarily a repository of photos of Kim. This is a reflection of what may be the fundamental conflict of Kim’s personality: she is, obviously, a very kind, family-oriented wife and mother, but she has also never denied that she is. seems to live to take and post photos of herself looking for warmth — and that has always been her Instagram main project. Yes, there has been a dramatic increase in posts for her beauty line, body shaping clothing line, and fragrance line, but luckily a lot of these promotional posts also feature images of Kim, so they fit in perfectly. And maybe that’s where I went wrong, scrolling through these 5,000 articles expecting to see Kim and Kanye’s love story unfold before my eyes. Perhaps the lesson from the prominent Instagram presence Kim has maintained throughout her relationship with Kanye says more about her refusal to be subsumed into Kimye, despite all the hype. Weddings end, but your brand is forever.