The first week of school, I wrote that I wouldn’t write about Kim Kardashian. I lied. But, you know who else lied? Kim Kardashian, when she said, “Till death do us part.”
After a whopping 72 days, Kardashian and NBA star Kris Humphries are getting a divorce. This should surprise no one. This is America, where divorces are given out like Halloween candy, and celebrities collect them like Pokemon cards. Under normal circumstances, my policy is not to care, (which by and large, I don’t) but for some reason, I’m angry about this one and now I really want to know what’s becoming of marriages in America.
Now, if there is one thing I hate, it’s celebrity gossip. If there are two things I hate, they’re celebrity gossip and celebrity gossip about faux-celebrities. Kim Kardashian is part of that uniquely 21st century breed of people famous simply for being famous. To be fair, she’s not quite Paris Hilton: She owns a chain of clothing stores with her sisters (who do most of the work). But, beyond that, she’s only famous for having a reality TV show, and that only exists by virtue of her family’s residual fame from her father being O.J. Simpson’s lawyer. When I first heard of the show, my only thought was how similar their name was to the “Cardassians” from Star Trek. If she weren’t so astoundingly attractive, I wouldn’t even acknowledge her existence.
So, what makes this divorce special and worthy of my interest? Obviously, I could make fun of its laughable duration, even by Hollywood standards. But what really irks me about this divorce is the wedding that preceded it. Reportedly, the Kardashian-Humphries nuptials cost $10 million. All of it, from the dress to the diamond, was covered, free of charge. Why? The entire oppulent affair was filmed and broadcast to millions of people in a two-part special on E!. Not only did she get a free wedding out of it, but she actually made $18 million (or enough to buy Jay-Z’s stake in the New Jersey Nets and become her husband’s new boss). She was paid more to be in her own wedding than what the average family will make in about 300 years (Pretty solid 1 percent status).
You can do the math, or if you’re a humanities major like me, at least you can connect the dots. Someone makes $18 million from a wedding only to call it off less than three months later. Everyone makes mistakes. Not everyone profits handsomely off them. The only people to make more money off wholesale failure were investment bank CEOs (Definitely 1 percent).
Did I mention this is her second marriage? The first lasted four years, a veritable lifetime in comparison to the current one. Either her first marriage was not all that bad for the majority of it, or she sat on the deck watching the Titanic sink for a pretty long time. This time around, just to be safe, she’s jumping ship while still in sight of land. I can’t really say for certain that their “irreconcilable differences” are actually as bad as claimed, but it feels slightly like they didn’t even try.
I’m not against divorce for the right reasons, but what should be a final measure, today looks more like a reset button. Turn to the person nearest you. If you both get married (not to each other), odds are that one of you will get divorced. What does this say about us when we suck so much at commitment? The basic social unit and paragon of stability is failing: Between 40 and 50 percent of marriages in any given year will end.
It really doesn’t help that this divorce culture is self-perpetuating. We put no real mental effort into thinking about whether or not we’re ready for a lifelong commitment and then just blow it off when it doesn’t work out. Then, because so many people get divorced, it’s not uncommon to put even less thought into your marriage because, hey, the first one’s just practice right? No, no it’s not, and that mindset is messing us up.
Don’t forget that this doesn’t just affect adults. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University estimates that 37 percent of children grow up with divorced or separated parents. Luckily, Kardashian has no offspring to be scarred by her parents’ split. Not every broken family is so lucky. Children need stability, and they’re probably not going to get it living in different homes on the weekends and having to decide which parent they love more.
So forget gay marriage; the real threat to family values is the crumbling consistency of straight marriage. Any “sanctity” left isn’t going to survive to the end of the decade if we keep on keeping up with Kardashian. It’s bad enough among the famous, but this trickles into the lives of normal people, too. Like Ani DiFranco said, “Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.”
Please, to all those students on the “ring before spring” track (I know you’re out there), really think about what you’re getting into, and think about what the consequences of failure will be. Your mistakes could be the ones that keep this problem running into the future. The only way to fix this is to take marriage a lot more seriously than we have been and get over our collective commitment phobia when things go sour. And above all, stop watching reality television.
