Kris Humphries Says There Was Nothing Fake About His Relationship With Kim Kardashian
Let's go on a journey together back through time to the distant year of 2011, back when we were all obsessed with Kim Kardashian’s romantic life — hard to imagine, right? Just kidding, we will obviously never get enough of our girl Kim K. Anyway, back then, she was in a whirlwind romance with New Jersey Jets player Kris Humphries. We watched their 72-day marriage play out on Keeping Up With The Kardashians (including their $10 million wedding!). It made for epic TV, but was it all fake? According to the groom, Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian’s relationship was, in fact, “100 percent real.“
If you're wondering why we're talking about this eight years later, it's because we are finally getting Humphries' side of the story. In a recently penned op-ed for The Players' Tribune about his desire to be known as a great basketball player, Humphries took the opportunity to talk about his relationship with Kardashian in an effort to finally set the record straight. Humphries says he fell in love with someone famous, but wasn’t prepared for the reality of dating a, well, reality star. “I met a girl who happened to be really famous, and I got married, and.…. Damn,” Humphries wrote. “Look, I should have known what I was getting into. I was definitely naive about how much my life was going to change. But the one thing that really bothers me is whenever people say that my marriage was fake.”
While the basketball star cops to the fact that not all is real in reality TV, he wants to make it clear how he and Kardashian felt about one another was totally authentic — as well as how it felt to break up in the public eye. “There’s definitely a lot about that world that is not entirely real. But our actual relationship was 100 percent real. When it was clear that it wasn’t working… what can I say? It sucked. It’s never easy to go through the embarrassment of something like that — with your friends, with your family…. But when it plays out so publicly, in front of the world, it’s a whole other level. It was brutal,” he wrote.
Humphries also shared how hard it was to have his personal life interfere with his career on the basketball court, as public opinion, shaped by reality TV editors, turned on him. “I didn’t know how to handle it, because I never thought I was going to be famous in that way. I remember having this moment when I was getting booed so hard in Philly, and I thought to myself, ‘Why exactly are they booing me, though? Is it just because I’m That Guy from TV? Do they think I was trying to be famous? Is it because they think I disrespected the game of basketball?”
He also shared that having that kind of attention — both positive and negative — really took a toll on him. “My whole life, I was a really confident, happy person," he wrote. "But nothing can prepare you for the feeling of walking down the street, or being anywhere, really — the grocery store, the gas station — and having people literally running up on you and trying to film you, trying to grab you, saying God knows what. That’s not natural. That’s not supposed to be real life.”
Honestly, my heart goes out to him. Not everyone is made for reality TV like the Kardashians. That kind of scrutiny could be brutal — especially when you have to watch your heartbreak play out on international TV. That being said, it's great to finally hear his side of the story and know that what we saw play out between him and his ex was the real deal.
