Kody Brown has delivered new insight into his failed marriage with Meri Brown.
And the main insight the polygamous father of 18 offered up on Sunday night’s Sister Wives tell-all special?
This marriage was basically doomed from the outset.
“We have a lot of history and I love him,” Meri admitted to host Sukanya Krishnan early on, adding of her former husband:
“He has chosen not to love me and not to want a relationship with me and so far, as to consider himself not married to me. So I think that’s what we’re sitting with.”
Kody then pointed out that the estranged couple entered plural marriage at a “young age” and had to “establish a family” without the wherewithal to do so.
“I married Meri and it was a hard relationship from the very beginning,” he said on air.
On part one of this same special, Kody said he doesn’t consider himself married to Meri any longer… a revelation that crushed his spouse.
Kody got into a relationship with Janelle Brown after meeting his first wife, calling Janelle “a blessing of dilution [because] it diluted this relationship I had with Meri.”
“I’m in an established relationship with somebody that I don’t even get along with and then I bring somebody else in and then now it’s triangulating,” Kody explained of bringing Janelle into his relationship universe.
“And then we bring Christine in and that seemed to calm it because we started having children and we seemed to have this more unified focus even though the strain was perpetual.”
The obvious answer to all of this, of course, may be that polygamy is a horribly unfair and sexist arrangement.
But Kody doesn’t see it that way; he says his marriage to Meri turned into a “storm” immediately after their “honeymoon period.”
For the record, Meri and Kody got married in 1990 and the pair welcomed child Leon Brown in 1995.
He eventually went on to spiritually wed Janelle and Christine before welcoming fourth, final and, at this point, his only legal wife, Robyn Brown.
In November 2021, however, Christine announced her departure from the family, moving back to Utah in the process.
Since then, Janelle has also confirmed she and Kody are separated, while it sounds very much like Meri has at last gotten the message and isn’t really with Kody at all anymore.
On part two of this reunion, meanwhile, Kody said for the first time that Janelle previously left the plural marriage.
“The family was in a bad place because Janelle moved out. She was done. She left with her mother,” he revealed.
“I didn’t feel like she was leaving me but was leaving them because I wasn’t giving her enough support. She couldn’t abide being with Christine and Meri any longer.
“It was just too much strain on her life.”
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10/9c on TLC.
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