Ten Years On From Marrying K-Fed, It’s Time To Recognise Britney Spears is More Resilient Than All Of Us

Today marks 10 years since Britney Spears legally married Kevin Federline, and now we all know what the Grateful Dead meant when they said what a long, strange trip it’s been.

I mean, none of us escaped that relationship scot-free. Before we made her a walking Federline punchline, we spent a few years using Britney to fuel our senses of superiority. After all, we would never eat snacks at a gas station. We would never hook up with the worst person to ever exist. (Sorry, Kevin, but… well, you were.) We would never wear trucker hats. (In 2004, when some of us shelled out £50 for a Von Dutch number because we just wanted to be cool so bad, guys.) Ultimately, we told ourselves – and everyone who would listen – that we’d do everything differently because we were better. We weren’t some pop star who’d been living her life under the public gaze since we were wee baby teens. We were eating these gas station snacks as a joke, I swear.

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Of course, we know what happened next: their marriage crumbled, Britney broke down, her insanely public cry for help was met with even more jokes about shaved heads and hitting cars with umbrellas. Then she lost control of almost every aspect of her career and her personal life – after we made fun of her even more for her MTV Video Awards 'comeback' that saw her performing as a shell of the pop force she’d been.

At no point did we look at her situation like real, thinking, actual human beings and admit: 'Wow, life for Britney Spears seems really hard.' At no point did we consider that turning her mental health disorder into late-night talk show fodder was, um, extremely damaging not to just Britney herself but to anybody who’s ever battled anything similar. At no point did we decide not to fail her.

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Frankly, if Britney had told us all to fuck off in 2009, it would’ve been understandable. But she didn’t. Instead, she released Femme Fatale in 2011 (which is a banger of an album, thank you very much), and hustled like a woman who considered conquering the world stage as old hat. She didn’t apologise for her marriage, or her gas station snacks (and neither will I: I ate a Snickers bar for dinner yesterday because I was running late… for my actual dinner), or her public meltdown because why should she?

If 'hard as fuck' could apply to one person, that person would be Britney Spears. Sure, her marriage to Kevin marked the beginning of a decade we can describe best as 'a turbulent few years', but not only did she have the guts to leave said marriage, and to get the mental and emotional help she needed, she kept working, hustling, and getting stronger. (But even more than her 1999 self would have us believe.)

Britney Spears is resilience personified, and we know it. That’s probably why any jokes about her or her previous circumstances are now being met with disapproving looks of disappointment and 'please never make a joke again.' And if they’re not, then they should be. Odds are the person making them would never have withstood even the Federline years.

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Pictures: Getty, Rex

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.