Kody Brown no longer feels the passion in his marriage to Meri Brown.
In a sneak peek of Sunday’s Sister Wives episode, the Brown family patriarch opens up about how his marriage with Meri is strained and has lost the spark it needs to keep it going.
“I feel like Meri and I have had a reasonably amiable relationship,” he says to the cameras. “It’s distant, I don’t see her very often. I don’t know what to do with a marriage that’s supposed to be eternal, but doesn’t have any fire.”
Despite the rift that’s grown between them, in her own confessional Robyn Brown shares her hopes for Kody and Meri’s reconciliation.
“If Meri just sticks around long enough, and we get through what’s going on with Christine [Brown], and even you know, Kody and Janelle [Brown], figure out whatever they’re gonna do, and he can get through all of his anger and his emotions about everything, that they will have a chance to work it out,” she says.
In January, Meri and Kody announced their split in a joint message posted on their respective Instagram pages, writing, “After more than a decade of working on our relationship in our own unique ways, we have made the decision to permanently terminate our marriage relationship.”
Meri, 52, and Kody, 54, got married in 1990. The now-exes — who share child Leon Brown — eventually entered into a polygamous arrangement with Janelle, 54, before welcoming Christine, 51, and Robyn, 44, into the plural marriage. Meri later divorced Kody so that he could legally adopt Robyn’s children from her previous marriage.
The original Brown family pair experienced many issues over the years, with Meri’s catfish drama — in which she virtually connected with a woman posing as a male admirer — serving as the tipping point in their strained relationship. From Meri’s perspective, she and Kody were “definitely” in “limbo land” for a while before announcing their split after 32 years of marriage.
“I don’t like living in limbo land. And I feel like I live there a lot, but what I like now is that any limbo land I’m living in is on me, and it’s not based on anybody else,” she recently told.
“I do wish that we could have had some of the conversations sooner. And also, I don’t know if I would’ve been ready to have some of the conversations sooner,” she continued. “So it’s not like I can live my life with regret and wish something would’ve happened. I think we all do that to some degree, but I know that there’s things that I needed to learn, and I know there’s things that I needed to do to be able to be in the place that I am right now with the whole thing.”
Like Meri, Christine and Janelle have also ended their marriages to Kody. Robyn now remains Kody’s only wife.
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
