Khloe Kardashian's Most Painful Relationship Confessions
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Khloé is the Kardashian many people actually want to keep up with, because she is arguably the most relatable one in her famous family. Glamour magazine called her the most "normal" Kardashian, and BuzzFeed claimed she is "the best" Kardashian. The down-to-earth reality show star is relentlessly honest about her struggles with her weight, self-doubt, and love, which is why she has more than 74 million Instagram followers wanting to know more about her life, including her love life.
Unfortunately, that means Khloé has been forced to be candid about the times when her relationships have crashed and burned. First there was Lamar Odom, who basically cheated throughout their whole marriage. Then there was James Harden, who Khloé claims also cheated during their incredibly brief relationship. Most recently, and just before Khloé welcomed her first child into the world, news broke that Tristan Thompson, her baby daddy, was also allegedly caught cheating.
That would be a tough string of relationship failures for anyone to endure, let alone someone whose entire life is on television. While we wait for Khloé's response to the accusations against Thompson, let's take a look at her most painful relationship confessions.
High school heartbreak
One of the things Khloé Kardashian's fans like about her is how she doesn't sugar-coat things. When she shared her teenage experiences with her readers on her KhloeWithaK website in 2016, she kept it real.
"It's not funny to lose your virginity! It's weird and you're scared and it hurts and you don't know what will happen," Kardashian wrote (via Us Weekly). I was 15 and he was an older guy who wasn't a virgin," she shared. "I don't really remember it hurting but I do remember that I just wanted to get it over with."
She also wrote about the guy responsible for her first heartbreak at age 17. "He was so mean. He lived in L.A. but his mom lived in Atlanta, so on Valentine's Day, he told me he was going back home to Atlanta and just left and never came back," she said. "Later on, he called me and asked me to fly out there to meet him. My dad warned me not to go, but I did. The guy NEVER picked me up from the airport!!! He never showed! I got a voicemail from him and he said, 'I'm sorry. I can't do this.'" What a jerk.
No regrets
Kardashian spoke on the Howard Stern Show in 2016 about how she married NBA star Lamar Odom in 2009 at age 24 after just a month of dating. When Stern asked her if that was a mistake, she replied, "I'm sure people would say it's a mistake for me, I wouldn't change what I did because it was also some of the best times of my life."
Her mother and sisters thought it was way too soon, and told her so. "All of them were like 'You're f****ing nuts.' It was nine days after meeting him we were like 'We're going to get married,'" she revealed.
She called her relationship with Odom "the most intense relationship I've ever had in a great way," but also told Stern, "Looking back in hindsight, would I say 'Oh, yeah probably should you have waited a little bit?' Sure. But also, I don't regret doing it."
Lamar was a busy boy
Kardashian also spoke on the Howard Stern Show in 2016 about how then-husband Lamar Odom had betrayed her with other women way before that highly-publicized incident in the Nevada brothel when he reportedly overdosed.
"Lamar was so great at making me feel like I was the only one and I'm this princess ... so I didn't suspect anything," she said. "He was so good. ... He was really crafty. ... It's disgusting."
According to her interview with Stern, Odom kept his side pieces' phone numbers off his own cell phone, storing them on his assistant's cell phone, instead. Kardashian even got super candid with the shock jock about the many ways in which she felt she was satisfying Lamar's needs, but he still ran around on her with other women. "I genuinely am blown away by ... when did he fit that in? — I don't know." she said.
Of course, there was also the public humiliation aspect of it all. "It is humiliating on any level," she said, pointing out that it was particularly terrible to discover later that Lamar was cheating "the majority of our marriage." Oof.
Love truly is blind
Despite Khloé Kardashian's rocky marriage to NBA star Lamar Odom, when Complex magazine asked her in 2015 if she still missed her husband, she said, "Oh my god, I miss him every day. I miss what we had — things we got to do together are just memories."
She added, "There's times I'll get so sentimental and so sad, but this had to happen for some reason. I'll figure it out over time... I think it would be very f***ing weird if I didn't miss it."
Around the same time, Kardashian also told Women's Health, "I love Lamar to death." She described him in glowing terms, calling him "the love of my life" and excusing a lot of the problems they had on account of his personal demons. "Do I wish he had tried harder? Yes. Do I think that he maybe didn't have the energy to fight because he was fighting so many other things? Yeah."
Pressing pause on divorce
Khloé Kardashian's kid sister, Kim Kardashian, may have been married to NBA star Kris Humphries for just 72 days, but Khloé took her marriage to Lamar Odom a little more seriously. She told Complex magazine in 2015, "When you genuinely feel like that was the right relationship, you're supposed to give it all you can. That's what marriage is about."
She added, "I'm not rushing into my divorce because I'm not looking to get married tomorrow, so I don't have a deadline." She called their relationship the "best" she ever had and shared, "Some people don't get that ever and I had that magic for a long time."
Of course, there was also a practical reason for putting off the official split. According to People, Khloé successfully had her divorce filing with Odom "dismissed" in the aftermath of his near-fatal overdose so that she would be able to retain "full authority to make medical decisions for him" throughout his recovery. We can't even imagine how painful it must have been to put her ability to move on from the toxic relationship on hold in order to help nurse the man who constantly cheated on her back to health.
Letting go on Instagram
In April 2016, Khloé Kardashian finally seemed to be saying goodbye to her marriage to Lamar Odom for good (the couple's divorce was finalized later that year). She posted the following quote on her Instagram account: "It doesn't matter how loyal you are to someone. You can't change someone's heart and bad habits unless they want to themselves."
In the lengthy caption on the post, Kardashian spelled out that it took her "so many years" to realize that "sometimes the person you want most is the person you're best without." She also posted several other quotes throughout the post, including one about how "letting go with love takes great strength," as well as the following admission of just what toll the marriage took on her:
"A Girl once told me... Be careful when trying to fix a broken person. For you may cut yourself on their shattered pieces." Poor Khloé.
Rebounding with French Montana
What was the deal with Khloé Kardashian and rapper French Montana?
"I don't think I was ready at all to have a serious relationship at the time," she told Complex magazine in 2015. "I needed time on my own to digest everything that's happened. I went from Lamar to just distracting myself."
Kardashian admitted that while she was honest about not being ready, she still felt bad about diving in with someone else. "I don't think it's fair for me to lead somebody on, or for me to act like I'm in this perfect head space if I'm not." She said when it comes to love, "You don't mislead or play around, so if you're not perfectly clear, just be honest about it."
Fortunately, this brief rebound relationship didn't generate any ill will between the rapper and the reality star. "I love memories ... and I still talk to him," Kardashian told Us Weekly. "There's no bad blood or anything."
New NBA fling, same as the old NBA fling
After the demise of her marriage to Lamar Odom, and the end of her relationship with French Montana, Khloé Kardashian dated Houston Rockets star James Harden, but that relationship didn't last long.
She dished all the details on a 2016 episode of her TV show Kocktails wIth Khloe (via Entertainment Tonight). She said she didn't expect monogamy from the long-distance relationship, but allegedly pushed for a more serious connection. "He wanted [a relationship]." she said. "I wanted it, but I wanted to be realistic. He sought me out."
So, Kardashian dove in with yet another NBA star, and suffered a horrible case of déjà vu. "He wanted to be committed and, you know, then wasn't committed," she said. "So Koko had to go go!" Khloe also claimed that she had "the receipts to prove" Harden's alleged infidelities, although she never publicly revealed them. Yeesh.
What is it with the Kardashian women and dudes in the NBA?
The trouble with fame
After news broke in early 2016 that James Harden had allegedly cheated on Khloé Kardashian and was reportedly spotted in a strip club with her sister's then-boyfriend (that would be Kylie Jenner's ex, Tyga,) Kardashian posted another quote to Instagram: "Stay away from people who make you feel like you are hard to love."
Kardashian then told her followers, "Never compromise the way you desire to be loved. We all should require and demand a certain type of love and that's for us to choose in any realm. Don't lose yourself in lowering your standards to make someone else comfortable in love. Search for a love that's equal."
She also blogged about public breakups on her paywalled website. According to excerpts printed by the Daily Mail, she doesn't mention Harden specifically in the painful blog post, but she does have this to say about the experience of infidelity: "It's almost like you have to go through it twice: privately and publicly. I've been there, for sure, and it's hard." Addressing how she feels, in general, about having her personal drama play out in the public arena, she writes, "It's humiliating. It's like pouring salt into an open wound. It definitely makes it hard to close that chapter of your life."
Exercising her demons, literally
There's something other than her love life that Khloé Kardashian has been just as candid about — her body. She has tracked her fitness transformation on television, social media, and in her book, Strong Looks Better Naked. The two subjects actually intersect, according to Kardashian, because her entire body revolution started as a way of dealing the issues in her marriage to Lamar Odom.
In the book, Kardashian writes that she started going to the gym out of loneliness and boredom after she and Lamar relocated to Dallas so he could play for the Mavericks. However, in a later interview with Harper's Bazaar, she revealed that her exercise inspiration was a bit darker than that.
"My home [with Odom] was dark and toxic," she told the mag. "At the time, my family didn't know what I was going through. It was the biggest secret I've kept. I just needed a place to go." The only place she could find solitude from her family, the paparazzi, and really, anyone, was the gym. "They had a TV and I could watch The Real Housewives on an elliptical," she joked. "No one talked to me. I loved that solitude."
Hey, at least something positive came out of it, right?
Happily never after
Kardashian's whirlwind romance with Thompson hit a major roadblock in April 2018 when TMZ and the Daily Mail simultaneously broke the story of Thompson's alleged cheating. Multiple videos emerged of the NBA star allegedly making out with a woman in an NYC club, then returning with her to his hotel room.
The backdrop for the alleged cheating is all the more shattering, considering Kardashian had previously declared 2017 "one of the best years of my life" and was just weeks away from delivering her first child, whom she conceived with Thompson.
Though she hasn't spoken publicly about the allegations, as of this writing, sources told People that Kardashian has been on "an emotional rollercoaster" since the scandal broke. She allegedly gave Thompson "the benefit of the doubt" that perhaps this was all "a set-up," but as more and more details emerged, the public humiliation has become too much to bear.
We can't be sure how Kardashian will react, especially now that a newborn child is involved in the situation, but we know from previous statements she's made that she does not take cheating lightly.
In their 2010 book, Kardashian Konfidential, the sister co-authors declared cheating to be "unacceptable." In her own less specific thoughts on infidelity, Khloé wrote in Strong Looks Better Naked that "every relationship involves risk and uncertainty, but you can minimize it with honesty." She added, "Honesty is a good way to put your cards on the table and to look out for yourself. And if you aren't looking out for yourself, who is?"
Good question, Khloé.