The Love Lesson To Learn From The Kardashians

On a recent episode of the Kardashians, somewhere between Khloe being disgusted by a perfectly harmless jackfruit and Kim waxing her own assistant’s mustache, Scott Disick sat down with Kris Jenner for lunch. He did so because, as he said, “Kris really is like my mom. So for me, it’s a lot of fun to hang out with her.” He then asks her if she wants to do a spa day or make a habit of going on long walks together. Kris can’t contain her excitement about any of it. She loves the idea, would love to spend more time with Scott. By the end of the lunch, Scott has decided that he wants to sit Kris down and do a legacy video. 

If you’re not familiar with a legacy video, which I certainly was not, it’s essentially a filmed interview of a person’s life. Scott feels like there is so much about Kris’s early life that the family doesn’t know and he wants to share it. So, later in the episode, Scott sits down with Kris and films her answers about her deceased father, her stepfather, her mother, how she met Robert Kardashian, and a number of other things that most of the Kardashian clan had not yet asked her. He then compiles her answers into a video and makes DVD copies for everyone in the family. All of the Kardashian daughters love watching it and Kris is touched.

But let’s just back up and go through the facts here: Scott has three children with Kris’s daughter, Kourtney Kardashian, but they never married and they broke up after Scott was caught cheating. Scott also has a history of drunken benders and inexcusable behavior. So Kris Jenner isn’t and technically has never been his mother-in-law. What’s more, she’s got plenty of reasons to have given up on him. I’m only watching this chaos, and I’ve given up on him twice.

But no, Kris and Scott are still thick as thieves. In a previous episode, after Kris grills Scott about dating 19-year-old Sofia Richie, she assures him, “I’m always gonna be your mom.” And Scott tells the camera that the fact that Kris, “worries, loves, and cares about me is probably one of the greatest feelings I have.”

Kris Jenner loves Scott Disick unconditionally. 

Which allows me to come to my point — and I’m so sorry that it is going to sound like a hot take — but for me, Kris Jenner and Scott Disick, momager of the most hated family in show business and the man who bought himself a Lordship, are family goals. If my husband and I ever get divorced, I hope I can still be that close with my own mother-in-law that she still loves me all the same, the way Kris loves Scott. In this instance, the Kardashians are showing something to aspire to.

Let’s ditch, just for a moment, the common lectures on reality shows not being reality. Whether the dynamic between Kris and Scott is completely true, a little true, or entirely fake, is beside the point. What I’m talking about here is representation. I want to see relationships that give me hope for my own, that show me a good option for how to be. And for me, the Kardashian family represents a lot of family dynamics that I want to see more of.

Yes, they are rich and they often appear vapid and vain. They get into incredibly dumb fights, they have very dramatic marriages, and they are clearly detached from reality a lot of times. We can fight about why I don’t think that’s so bad another time! Or on Twitter. But I would argue that if you look past that, you’ll see that the Kardashians are representing a family in which we see a powerful matriarch whom everyone in the family truly likes, sisters who love spending time together and look forward to watching each other’s kids, two exes co-parenting as friends, and family vacations that — sure, are full of drama — but are also full of joy. This is a family that supports each other, works hard not to compete unhealthily with each other, and confronts one another and then apologizes and makes up. 

Simply put, the Kardashians like each other. And I like that. I think that’s good for our world to have in it.

And as someone who wants to believe one day her adult daughter might enjoy hanging out with her, the Kardashians give me hope. When I watch the show, what I’m thinking more than anything is that I like watching people who like being around each other. I like watching a family that loves one another.

After I finished that episode with Scott making Kris’s legacy video, I started thinking of all the questions our family has never asked my grandmother-in-law. And then I asked my mother-in-law if we should make one. And you know what she said? “That is a wonderful idea. It’s very, very thoughtful.”

And I said, “Ok, but I got it from the Kardashians.”