The year 2012 was cosmically important for Kim Kardashian: It’s when two of the most significant relationships in the starlet’s life began. That was the year she and rapper Kanye West became a couple, and it’s also when she began posting on a little photo-sharing app called Instagram.
Last Friday, Kardashian reportedly filed for divorce, marking the end of her and West as an official unit. Her Instagram, where she has more than 200 million followers, will live on. Though she has dabbled in other apps, including her own, over the years, it seems uncontroversial to say that Instagram is Kardashian’s primary platform, and that will only be more true as her reality show ends its run this year. And it’s strange to think that up till now, her account and her relationship with West have overlapped so completely—there was never a Kimye that didn’t exist on Kim’s Instagram, and Kim’s Instagram has never existed independently of Kimye. At present, there are 5,424 posts on Kim’s page that chronicle the entire span of her and West’s relationship (the 5,425th, posted this morning, heralds in the post-Kimye era), meaning that one-half of the couple’s telling of their story is just sitting there waiting to be discovered by anyone who cares to scroll all the way back to the beginning of her grid. Well, I have done this, and I have some findings.
I expect that we all have, on occasion, after hearing about a normal-person breakup, gone to one or both parties’ social media accounts to do a little sleuthing—when did it happen, and were there clues that we missed? But to do this sort of amateur detective work on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page is a task of entirely another scale. Even the most post-happy people I know in real life haven’t posted anywhere near 5,000 times. Remember the Library of Congress’ plan to archive every single public tweet? It abandoned that project, I have to imagine because that was entirely too many posts for any person or team of people to ever sift through, and that’s kind of how I feel, staring down Kim’s 5,424.
Anyway, here I go. Did Kim post fewer photos of Kanye in 2020, as the pair’s marital problems apparently mounted? Was she less effusive? Was he grumpier? Were the signs all there? Apart from the appearance that COVID seems to have barely impacted Kim, Kanye, and the extended Kardashian clan’s lives throughout the pandemic, which we already knew, a thorough read of the last year of Kim’s posts proves inconclusive. There have been small-ish recent tells that haven’t escaped the internet’s notice, like the Dec. 22 post in which Kim wasn’t wearing a wedding ring:
There was also the Jan. 8 post wherein the ring was still missing in action, which ended up mysteriously disappearing from her feed. The most recent reference to Kanye seems to be a later January post in which Kim is wearing Yeezys, Kanye’s line of sneakers, which sources say should be interpreted as a sign of détente between the two. The most recent actual photo or mention of Kanye, however, was on Nov. 22, when Kim posted a photo and caption congratulating him on the 10-year anniversary of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, one of his most acclaimed albums:
She also included photos of a note Kanye sent her that later became the inspiration for some song lyrics on the album, before the two ever became a couple. Sweet. Later in the holiday season, Kanye did not appear in any photos posted from Christmas or a trip to Tahoe around the same time. (Though we are focusing on her grid here, fans and professional Kardashian watchers are also attempting to read the tea leaves in her Instagram Stories, the first place she supposedly “broke her social media silence.”)
But those are just the last few months—have there been signs this was coming for longer than that? Signs that might be visible on Instagram, I mean, rather…
Read More: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s marriage and divorce, as seen in Kim’s 5,425