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

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

Last Friday, Kardashian filed for divorce, marking her and West’s demise as an official unit. Her Instagram, where she has more than 200 million followers, will live. Although she has been involved with other apps, including her own, over the years, it seems indisputable to say that Instagram is Kardashian’s primary platform, and that will only be more true when her reality show ends this year. And it’s weird to think that until now, your account and your relationship with West have overlapped so completely – there’s never been a Kimye that didn’t exist on Kim’s Instagram, and Kim’s Instagram never existed independently of Kimye. There are currently 5,424 posts on Kim’s page that chronicle the full extent of her and West’s relationship (5,425^º, posted this morning, heralds of the post-Kimye era), which means that half of the couple’s narrative is just waiting to be discovered by anyone who cares to roll back to the beginning of their grid. Well, I did that and I have some discoveries.

I hope that all of us, occasionally, after hearing about the breakup of a normal person, have gone to one or both parties’ social media accounts to do a little investigation – when did this happen and were there any clues we missed? But doing this kind of amateur detective work on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page is a task of entirely different scale. Even the most post-happy 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 abandoned this project, I have to imagine, because there were too many posts for any person or team of people to examine, and that’s how I feel, looking at Kim’s 5,424.

Anyway, here I come. Did Kim posted fewer photos of Kanye in 2020, as the couple’s marital problems apparently increased? Was she less effusive? Was he more moody? They were are the signs all there? In addition to the appearance that COVID appears to have badly impacted Kim, Kanye and the lives of the Kardashian clan extended during the pandemic, which we already knew, a thorough reading of Kim’s posts last year is inconclusive. There have been small, recent reports that have not escaped Internet attention, such as the December 22 post in which Kim was not wearing a wedding ring:

There was also the January 8 post in which the ring was still missing from action, which ended up mysteriously disappearing from its food. The most recent reference to Kanye appears to be a later January post in which Kim is wearing Yeezys, Kanye’s tennis line, which sources say should be interpreted as a sign of distension between the two. The most recent actual photo or mention of Kanye, however, was on November 22, when Kim posted a photo and caption congratulating him on the 10th anniversary of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, one of his most acclaimed albums:

She also included photos from a note that Kanye sent her that later became the inspiration for some lyrics on the album, before the two became a couple. Candy. Later in the holiday season, Kanye did not appear in any photos posted at Christmas or on a trip to Tahoe at the same time. (Although we’re focusing on her grid here, Kardashian fans and professional observers are also trying to read the tea leaves in her Instagram stories, the first place she supposedly “broke the social media silence.”)

But these are just the last few months – were there any signs that this would happen any longer than that? Signs that may be visible on Instagram, I mean, rather than reports of family conflicts over Kanye’s presidential race and, more specifically, a speech he gave where he told a personal story about a time when he and his wife considered the abortion. It is hard to say. June was certainly a tribute mine for him and their wedding: She posted one for Father’s Day and one for Kanye’s birthday (“Congratulations to my King”) and another for the couple’s sixth wedding anniversary. :

Truth be told, one reason it’s kind of hard to say definitively whether Kanye backed off on Kim’s Instagram or not is that Kim has never posted so many photos of Kanye in the first place. One of the first came in May 2012, just a few months after Kim’s first Instagram post, when she posted a picture of her, her future husband, her brother Rob and a lilac-haired Kelly Osbourne drinking a watermelon:

Kim and Kanye are two people who eventually, respectively, would rent a private island for an important anniversary during a pandemic and buy a hologram and take it to that island, therefore: a humble beginning. But drinking a watermelon is a far cry from turning your home into an opulent “full spiderweb experience” for the Halloween pandemic says more about Kim’s trajectory from reality star to billionaire (maybe?) A-lister than about their relationship with Kanye, although the two are not entirely independent. In fact, that watermelon photo is one of dozens of cute posts over the years that made it look like she and Kanye really cared about each other – their feed is full of pictures of them captioned with single-heart emojis (to mean love true), those in which she calls him boo and bae and #MCM (man crush Monday), and there is also ample evidence to be found that he couldn’t keep his hands off his famous ass:

Before the merry-go-round existed, Kim posted five loving photos of them on the timeline without being embarrassed. Her posts lately have been more commercial: Throughout 2020, she has been promoting a “Mrs. West ”makeup line inspired by her 2014 wedding – in Kardashianland, separating the commercial from the personal can be almost impossible. But recently, in January 2020, she posted gushing about a personalized necklace that sold their love with the same old strength. Did things degenerate so quickly that a year later she would be preparing for a divorce? Or did Kimye just have the sad 2020 that many of us had behind all the gimmicks, except with island vacations and six-digit holograms of loved ones who died on the scene?

What I finally realized is that Kanye was never the central attraction here. Kim’s Instagram is and has always been primarily a repository of Kim’s photos. This is a reflection of what may be the fundamental conflict of Kim’s persona: she is, by all appearances, a very sweet and family-oriented mother and mother, but she also never denied that she seems to live to take and post pictures of beautiful herself — and that more than anything else has always been the main project of her Instagram account. Yes, there was a dramatic increase in shilling posts for her beauty line, her shapewear line and her fragrance line, but luckily, many of these promotional posts also contain images of Kim, so they fit perfectly. And maybe that’s where I went wrong, going through the 5,000 posts hoping to see Kim and Kanye’s love story unfold before my eyes. Perhaps the lesson from the considerable presence on Instagram that Kim maintained throughout his relationship with Kanye says more about his refusal to be included in Kimye, despite all the hype. Weddings are over, but your brand is forever.