Kody Brown is revealing the terms and conditions he gave his wives before they joined his family.
In a sneak peek of Sunday’s episode of Sister Wives, Kody opens up about some of the “special requirements” he expected of his ex-wives Janelle and Christine Brown and acknowledges how he was spread too thin amongst his four wives.
While speaking to cameras, Kody introduces a term called “sacred loneliness,” which is used to describe women in plural marriages because “their husband’s not around as much.”
“Sacred loneliness? Like you’re supposed to honor the fact that you’re lonely?” Christine laughs while reacting to Kody’s statement.
Janelle says of the phrase, “The idea is that you sacrifice some of your emotional needs because you want to live in a plural marriage… I’ve always thought it was so dumb. Sorry.”
Meri then weighs in on the matter, noting that she often hears Kody talk about the difficulties women face in a plural marriage and adds, “It’s like, really, now you figured that out?”
But Robyn says, “Yeah, plural marriage can be lonely. In my head, it’s an opportunity for you to get a relationship with God.”
In another scene, while speaking to David Mitchell “Mitch” Thompson, Kody notes the emotional difficulties women can face in plural marriages, but admits he was “tired of hearing about the struggle” and remarks how “they all agreed that they were going to do this.”
Mitch notes in a confessional that until “you’ve sat in the seat and been a guy that’s had four wives and tried to meet the emotional, spiritual, physical, mental needs of four women,” it’s hard to speak confidently on the matter. “There’s a hubris that comes with judgement,” he points out.
But in his own confessional, Kody attempts to defend himself.
“I courted Meri and I courted Robyn, but Christine and Janelle both asked if they could be in the family,” he explains. “And with that ask, I had some special requirements that I wanted them to meet in order to come into the family and mainly that was there’ll be other wives, you’ve got to be committed to me.”
Janelle, on the other hand, clarifies Kody’s claims about how she and Christine asked to join the family and notes that the duo didn’t “deserve less” than his fourth wife Robyn, who was “invited.”
“It’s improper for a man to be out chasing wives,” she says. “It’s generally a woman [that] approaches the family and says, ‘Look, I feel like I had a spiritual revelation that maybe I belong in your family.’ He now keeps saying Christine and I asked to be in the family and Robyn was invited.”
She adds, “Somehow because Christine and I asked, we deserve less [and] we should be happy with what we got? It wasn’t like we were begging to be in the family. We simply asked, there was a courtship and then we all got married.”
Christine first announced that she was leaving the plural marriage back in November 2021. During the Sister Wives: One on One special in December 2022, both Meri Brown and Janelle revealed that they were both separated from the Brown family patriarch. Robyn Brown remains the only wife still married to Kody.
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
