Kylie Jenner and Tyga met in November 2011 at Kendall Jenner’s Sweet 16, a party that aired on Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Tyga performed. Kylie was 14. He was 21. That is the first documented crossing, not a dating announcement. Billboard and the teen magazines that later built timelines all start there because the cameras did.

What the public treated as a relationship did not get labeled official until around her 18th birthday in August 2015. The years in between are why the story never became a normal celebrity romance item. By August 2014 she was 17 and photographs from a birthday at his house were out, including a clip of a drink being offered while she was years under the legal age. October 2014 she was on a European trip with him at 17 while he was 24. Media scrutiny was not invented. It was the arithmetic of an adult rapper and a girl who was still legally a child in every state that writes statutory lines. Going public after 18 did not retroactively make those months ordinary. It only made the Instagram captions legal to post.

They were on and off for about three years in the public version of the story and split in April 2017. He had been with Blac Chyna; they share a son. She later had children with Travis Scott and has been with Timothée Chalamet. Those later chapters are not a sequel that softens the first page.

How to write this without turning it into a love story

A 21-year-old performing at a 16-year-old’s party is a booking. A 24-year-old traveling Europe with a 17-year-old who grew up on a reality show is a power imbalance with a paparazzi budget. Reality television put the meeting on air. Tabloids put the trip in the airport. Neither of those machines is a child-protection office. The age gap is the fact that made every other fact louder. It is also the fact that does not need adjectives.

Jenner has spent a decade as a business. Tyga has spent a decade as a hook. Their overlap is a matter of public record because they made it one. Repeating the Sweet 16 date is not nostalgia. It is the start of a timeline people keep asking for. The honest version keeps the ages in the same sentence as the events. Fourteen and 21. Seventeen and 24. Eighteen and the first official posts. Twenty and the breakup. That is the article. The rest is branding.