Kelly Clarkson stayed in her marriage for the sake of her ‘ego’.
Women are often shamed by society for leaving their marriages. It is seen as some sort of failure, not as a woman standing up for herself and deciding to leave a space where her needs weren’t met. The 41-year-old singer Kelly Clarkson married Brandon Blackstock in 2013 and has River, nine, and seven-year-old Remy with him, but the pair called it quits in 2021. Kelly says initially, she didn’t want to get divorced because she saw her parents go through one when she was a child.
Speaking on the ‘We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle’ podcast, she said, “My ego… I thought, ‘I can do this. I can handle so much’. My ego is, ‘I can control my actions, I can control my reactions, I can do this, and I can reach this person, and I can get through’. It becomes a little bit of your ego that gets in the way. If I’m being completely honest, we don’t want to do what we saw done. I don’t want my kids to be those kids at school.”
The Texas native – who wrote her 2004 hit ‘Because of You’ about her parent’s divorce – went on to add that because she is now based in the progressive area of California, things are very different, and she eventually learned she needed to be selfish to get out of her marriage. “It’s a little different — they grew up here, and it’s a very progressive city. But in the South, there were, like, two of us with divorced parents in our class. So it was very different. Even when you come down to, like, daddy-daughter dances and you don’t have anyone show up.
“You have to think about all of those things, and you play it out differently in your head too. You try so hard, and you think, ‘I do not want to do that to her, I don’t want to do that to him’ — that you never start thinking about yourself. That’s why sometimes to be selfish was important to me.”
