It was the first marriage for West, 43, and the third for Kardashian, 40. While the union wasn’t long, it outlasted the predictions of many cynics who thought doom was inevitable given the two oversized personalities, West’s well-known volatility and the fact that Kardashian’s previous marriage, to former NBA player Kris Humphries, was fleetingly brief.

Kardashian’s first marriage, at age 19 in 2000, to music producer Damon Thomas lasted until 2004, and in 2011 she married Humphries in a heavily hyped wedding that was televised in a two-part special on KUWTK.

She filed for divorce less than three months later, though was still legally married in 2012 when she and West, a friend for years who had paid tribute to her in his songs, became a couple, and she became pregnant.

Their four children are all seven or under: North, age seven, Saint, age five, Chicago, age three, and Psalm, 21 months old.

Both Kardashian and West have parlayed their initial fame – his for being a sought-after hip-hop producer and the rapper behind Stronger and Gold Digger, hers for becoming a reality TV star on a par with a movie star – into bigger endeavours, and have amassed considerable wealth with it.

West has 30 million followers on Twitter, Kardashian has nearly 200 million on Instagram. Both are among the most posted-about people in the history of social media.

While their marriage was extremely high profile in some ways, as two experts in self-promotion became a team, the two did not appear together in public all that frequently. And the inner workings of their marriage were usually a well-guarded secret that took years to spill out into public view. On Keeping Up with the Kardashians, West appeared only occasionally, mostly serving as an oft-discussed off-screen character, and unlike other Kardashian couplings, viewers didn’t see even made-for-TV versions of fights or especially tender moments.

But their careers did not have much overlap, and they spent much of their married time far apart.

In one of these, since deleted, in July 2020, West said he had been trying to divorce Kardashian, that her mother Kris Jenner was a tyrant and that the family was trying to force him into psychiatric treatment.

Kardashian responded with a statement on Instagram, urging people to have compassion for West as he struggled with mental illness.

“He is a brilliant but complicated person who on top of the pressures of being an artist and a black man, who experienced the painful loss of his mother, and has to deal with that pressure and isolation that is heightened by his bipolar disorder,” Kardashian said. “Those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his intentions.”

And now, less than a year later, it’s all over. Soon, Kimye will be a distant memory, just like Brangelina and Bennifer.

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