signs a celebrity marriage is over

The couple begin to explore extracurricular projects separately, often two or three years before they announce their separation. Take, for example, the great conscious uncoupling between Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin in 2014. Three years earlier, Paltrow was motivated, by a force no one understood at the time, to take up singing in public, with the coaching, not of her musician husband, but Beyonce. And in February 2011, she performed at the Grammys. It was a bewildering act. That was, until, Paltrow admitted in an essay for British Vogue in September that she knew in her “bones” her marriage was over just months earlier.

Then there are Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. Before they announced their separation in 2015, before the alleged affair with the nanny, Affleck threw himself into his most ambitious project yet: directing the Oscar-winning film, Argo. And when he won best director in 2013, he dropped this clanger, that echoed around the world as an awkward warning bell banging against the sanctuary of their marriage: “I want to thank my wife … for working on our marriage for 10 Christmases. It’s good. It is work but it’s the best kind of work.”

Garner maintained she loved the sentiment, but by 2013, she had returned to acting after a decade hiatus minding the kids – roaring back with an Oscar-winning movie of her own, The Dallas Buyers Club.

Another sign of celebrity break-up: the double-down. Take Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who announced their acrimonious separation in 2016 and divorce in 2019. What happened two years before 2016? Pitt married Jolie, though they’d already seemed content as a couple for nine years without incident. An act of desperation perhaps? Jolie started working on the script for By the Sea about the same time, a movie in which she and Pitt starred as a couple on the verge of a breakdown in 2015. Jolie later admitted it was an attempt to save their marriage.

So, what was happening in the Kardashian-West household two to three years ago?

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Well, 2018 was the first time their mansion, completely remodelled, was made public. West tweeted first-look photos of it, and Kardashian West later showcased it to Vogue, describing it as a “minimal monastery”. Social media users called the defiantly odd and empty residence “terrifying” with its stark walls, blank rooms with no furniture and bathroom sinks with no discernible basins or drains. One journalist went so far as to describe it as looking like a morgue.

If the family home is a metaphor for marriage, then their relationship might have been on the rocks three years ago.

Which is why, it now makes sense in retrospect, that three years ago, West became increasingly vocal of his support for former president Donald Trump, at one point even visiting him in the Oval Office.

Kardashian West met Trump in 2018 too, but for a different reason — in a bid to shorten the life sentence of Alice Johnson, 63, who was jailed for 20 years for a first-time drug offence. That successful pardon was just the beginning of Kardashian West’s foray into prison reform. In the same year, she began studying criminal law and has since assisted in the pardons of several prisoners.

West, meanwhile, not content just to fraternise with Trump, announced his 2021 presidential bid via Twitter in July. Two weeks later, he held a now-infamous campaign event during which he delivered an emotional, hour-long speech about race, abortion and the presidency. In it, he disclosed private details about his family including how the couple considered an abortion when they fell pregnant with their first child, North West.

The rambling speech prompted Kardashian West to release a rare statement asking for compassion, saying that West suffered from bipolar disorder and, despite it being a private matter, she wanted to comment “because of the stigma and misconceptions about mental health”.

Seven months later, and after seven years of marriage, Kardashian West filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Meanwhile, her social media feed remains business as usual; duck-face selfies, kids, new product launches for her various fashion and beauty businesses and just a sprinkling of family throwbacks.

This avoidance of the issue at hand, unusual for most celebrity divorcees, is in fact de rigueur for the Kardashians. Indeed, it points, not to an old fashioned stoicism, or desire for privacy, but their almost preternatural ability to spin their private life into a bonanza of gossip and publicity. Though the signs are at this moment, unclear, rumours abound that we will get the full story soon — on the curiously well-timed final season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians starting in three weeks.