Yesterday reports emerged that Kourtney Kardashian married her fiancee, Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker in a ceremony in Vegas. It wasn’t a huge surprise - this feels like a very Kourtney andTravis thing to do, a mere 36 hours after tonguing each other ferociouslyon the Grammy’s red carpet (and a mere week after tonguing each other on the Oscars red carpet).
The pair became official in January 2021, but had reportedly been friends for years - they lived near each other and their kids hung out together. At first glance, it’s a classic second-time-round relationship in that Kourtney is 42, Travis is 46 and they both spent the end of their 20s and start of their 30s in a long-term relationship with the parent of their children.
But there’s a very specific thrill we feel when we see Kourtney, who spent 10 years with original man-child Scott Disick, the father of her three children, being treated as an object of total lust and hotness by Travis. It’s like when your friend, who always undervalued herself, finally gets out of that rubbish relationship, starts having the best sex of her life and realises just how hot she is - you want to fist pump the air in victory.
We’re not alone - Twitter agrees that there’s a particular satisfaction in seeing Kourtney Kardashian hit her peak right now.
It’s not just (or even at all) about Kourtney finding love again - it’s seeing her being worshipped as the sex goddess that she so obviously deserves to be. In the decade she spent in an on-off relationship with Scott Disick, we witnessed Kourtney being cheated on, put upon, criticised for not losing her baby weight, or simply disregarded. There’s no denying that Kourtney Kardashian has always been hot, but we never saw any evidence that Scott realised this (no noisy red-carpet snogs or emotional, public proposals for those two). Instead, she had his children while he battled his demons, leaving her to repeatedly pick up the pieces.
So yes, we’re thrilled to see Kourtney being properly lusted after by a grown-up man who can’t get enough of her; it’s nothing less than she deserves. Her age is only relevant here because we still live in a world where we’re told you need to tick off all of life’s major milestones (marriage, children, career) before the end of your 30s - and on paper Kourtney did that. She got together with Disick when she was 26, had her first child aged 30 and her third aged 35, she ticked off the boxes at the ‘right’ age and her role in life could have been set in stone - a mother of three, a put-upon partner, the ‘cute’ rather than sexy oldest Kardashian sister.
Because that’s still how we expect women to live their lives - to decide who they want to be, and how they want to be perceived before they hit that scary fifth decade and slide gracefully into the menopause from that point onwards. As mad an irrational as it is, we still see 40 as an abrupt cut-off point for all sorts of things - a big wedding with a ‘proper’ wedding dress, having children, even starting on a career path. We accept that women can still look young - in fact we positively demand it - but we certainly don’t expect a 40-something woman to be overtly sexy or sexual - an object of lust who literally cannot stop snogging her boyfriend in public and runs off to Vegas to elope in a leather jacket.
That’s why we can’t get enough of Kourtney’s Kournaissance - not just because it speaks of all the great sex and embarrassing snogging still to come, but because she looks so happy. We got used to seeing Scott-era Kourtney grimacing at her phone after he was pictured with yet another woman, questioning her own worth and repeating a gruelling cycle of breakups and reunions with a man destined to break her heart again. Now, when her face isn’t smashed up against Travis’s, she can’t stop smiling. And we love to see it because she’s proof that nothing is set in stone. You can reinvent yourself, have more sex, be your hottest self, find all-consuming love at any age.
She’s thrilled with this turn of events, we’re thrilled, and we can only presume that Kris Jenner (who talked Kourtney out of a Vegas wedding with Scott back in the day) is giving herself a self-satisfied pat on the back at another job well done.