Kim Kardashian has described the years after her marriage to Kanye West as a period of deliberately taking her time rather than trying to immediately replace what had ended. In a new interview, Kardashian said being single for five years felt “great,” because it gave her room to focus on her four children, projects she wanted to pursue and her own recovery.
Her point was not that the years were empty or a pause before the next relationship. Quite the opposite: Kardashian said she did not feel empty, did not feel rushed and was not initially ready to open herself up to someone new. She characterized the time as necessary to heal and work on herself.
“I was really single for five years. And that felt great. I could focus on my kids and projects that I really wanted to be involved with. I really felt no rush,” Kardashian said.
That framing matters because a public relationship timeline can make private time look much simpler than it is. Kardashian was linked to and dated people during the broader period after her marriage, including Pete Davidson and later Odell Beckham Jr. But her description of being single is centered on priorities and emotional readiness, rather than on treating every reported romance as proof that she had moved on quickly.
A marriage, a divorce and the public pressure around both
Kardashian and West began dating in 2012 and married in Italy in May 2014. They share four children: North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm. Their separation and divorce became intensely public, while questions involving their children’s care and their finances remained unresolved for a time.
Kardashian filed for divorce in February 2021. A judge declared her legally single in March 2022, though the former couple still needed to settle custody and financial terms. Their November 2022 settlement established joint custody. It also required West to pay $200,000 a month in child support; neither party was to receive spousal support.
Those distinctions are useful. Being legally single means a court has ended the legal marital status. It does not necessarily mean every aspect of a divorce is finished on that same day. Parenting arrangements, child support and property or financial matters can be resolved later, as they were here. For a couple raising four children, the legal conclusion of a marriage also does not end the ongoing need to co-parent.
In Kardashian’s account, that broader reality is part of why time mattered. She said she wanted to heal completely before opening up. The emphasis is less on a fixed schedule for dating and more on having enough space to direct attention toward family and work without treating romance as an obligation.
Related coverage includes Kim Kardashian Reflects on Healing, Motherhood and a New Relationship.
Dating in the middle of a very public divorce era
Kardashian dated comedian Pete Davidson from fall 2021 until August 2022. The relationship unfolded while her divorce proceedings were still in the public eye and became a repeated subject of West’s music and social-media activity.
West’s March 2022 video for “Eazy” included animated imagery of Davidson being kidnapped and buried. It arrived on the same day Kardashian was declared legally single. After Kardashian and Davidson later broke up, West posted a mock newspaper image to Instagram using the headline “SKETE DAVIDSON DEAD AT AGE 28.”
West defended the imagery in an Instagram statement, writing that his art was not a substitute for causing harm and that interpretations suggesting otherwise were false. He later apologized for causing Kardashian stress during a September 2022 television interview that also addressed their disagreements over raising their children.
The episode helps explain why Kardashian’s present comments carry more weight than a standard celebrity-dating update. Her relationships did not play out in a vacuum; they were repeatedly pulled into public conflict. Saying that she felt no urge to fill a void is a direct contrast to the familiar expectation that a newly single public figure must rapidly demonstrate a new beginning.
It is also a reminder that a relationship can be public without its participants having chosen every element of that exposure. Kardashian and Davidson’s romance was visible, but it was also made into material for social posts and a music video by someone outside the relationship. Kardashian’s current remarks instead put the focus on her own pace: healing first, openness later.
What Kardashian means by focusing on herself
“Working on myself” can become a vague celebrity phrase, but Kardashian supplied some concrete priorities. She named her children and projects she wanted to be involved with. The statement presents singlehood as active time, not a holding pattern.
That does not mean she claims to have avoided dating altogether. Davidson was part of her post-marriage life, and Kardashian was later linked to NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. beginning in September 2023. Reports indicated that relationship had ended by April 2024. The timeline is not evidence of a single, uninterrupted retreat from relationships. Rather, Kardashian is explaining that dating did not erase her sense that she needed time and did not require her to rush toward a lasting partnership.
There is a practical distinction between healing and simply waiting. Waiting is about the calendar: a person can count months or years. Healing, as Kardashian describes it, is about readiness—having the capacity to open up, while making room for personal responsibilities and ambitions. Her five-year figure is therefore context for her experience, not a rule that anyone else should follow.
For someone with four children and a globally scrutinized career, privacy and control over timing may be especially hard to preserve. Her comments suggest that she regarded her ability to prioritize those things as a success rather than as an absence of romantic possibility.
Reports of a relationship with Lewis Hamilton
Kardashian is now publicly associated with Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton, a longtime friend. Romance reports surrounding the pair emerged early in 2026. They attended February’s Super Bowl together and were later photographed kissing in Malibu, developments that pushed the relationship further into view.
In June 2026, Kardashian shared a photo and video of a bike ride with Hamilton in New York on Instagram. While public appearances and social posts offer visible markers, they do not supply a complete account of a relationship. What Kardashian has spoken about directly is the approach that preceded this chapter: she did not feel compelled to rush, and she wanted to be ready before she opened up.
That distinction is worth retaining amid the usual appetite for a clean celebrity timeline. Publicly observed moments can indicate that two people are spending time together. They cannot, by themselves, explain the emotional work Kardashian says she did in the years after her marriage. Her own comments are more narrowly drawn: she found value in being on her own and in giving herself the space to recover.
Why the timeline should not be mistaken for the whole story
Celebrity relationship coverage often turns life events into a sequence of names, red-carpet appearances, photographs and breakups. Kardashian’s comments introduce a different metric: whether she felt ready. Her experience includes dates and relationships after the marriage, but her central claim is that she did not see singleness as something that had to be fixed.
That is particularly notable given the public nature of her divorce. The marriage ended in a period that involved court proceedings, co-parenting disputes, public commentary and material that brought Davidson into the conflict. Kardashian’s choice to describe those years as “great” does not erase those pressures. It indicates that she found purpose and stability in areas she could prioritize—her children, work and self-directed healing.
West, meanwhile, later moved on with Yeezy architectural designer Bianca Censori. A marriage license listed their wedding date as December 20, 2022. Kardashian’s new relationship reporting arrives separately from that development and should not be reduced to a competition over who moved on first. Her remarks explicitly reject the premise of a race: she says she felt no rush.
For readers looking at the headline-level version, the important update is not simply that Kardashian has been seen with Hamilton. It is the explanation she has offered for how she arrived at a point where a new relationship felt possible. After a marriage that began in 2014, a divorce filing in 2021 and a legal-single ruling in 2022, she says her priority was first to reclaim time for her family, projects and recovery.
The result is a more grounded reading of the public narrative. Kardashian is not presenting solitude as loneliness, nor is she presenting a relationship as proof of completion. She is describing both as parts of a longer process, one in which being single was valuable because it let her decide when, and whether, to let someone new in. For another recent look at how public figures and relationship narratives become points of wider cultural debate, see this discussion of accountability and celebrity discourse.
