What a wild ride the past few seasons of Sister Wives have been, right?
In the beginning, when the show premiered all the way back in 2010, the show was about an unconventional family that definitely had some struggles, but in the end they all loved each other and were, you know, a family.
These days it seems like no one can even stand each other.
Many Sister Wives fans believe that Robyn is Kody’s favorite wife and that he’s been pushing his other wives away because he truly only wants to be with her, but even they’ve started bickering with each other.
A big part of this current season and some of the previous one has been Kody’s quickly deteriorating relationship with Christine, who announced last month that she’d officially left him, so obviously that didn’t work out.
His relationship with Janelle has always seemed to be a bit more based in friendship, but they’ve been having some major disagreements in regards to how they should deal with Covid.
And then, of course, there’s Meri.
We all know the background here — they used to be a lot closer, but they struggled with her infertility, which seemed to push them apart.
That, along with their decision to get divorced (as his first wife, Meri was the only one who was legally married to him) so that he could marry Robyn and adopt her children made her feel even more hurt, and that’s when she sought out the attention of a person she thought was a man named Sam but who was actually a woman catfishing her.
After that, things were never the same between Meri and the rest of the family, and Kody especially began pushing her away more and more as the years went by.
In recent seasons, we’ve heard them say that the relationship between them is “dead,” and that they’re really just friends now.
And in a new sneak peek for this week’s episode, Meri is confirming that — and she’s also announcing her own plans on what to do about the situation.
The clip, which you can watch in full below, begins with Meri going for a hike by herself and acknowledging that she’s by herself pretty much constantly now.
“As a family, we really haven’t spent much time together,” she tells the camera. “And it’s … weird.”
“It’s lonely,” she stresses during a different conversation with the camera. “Like, I live alone. I just miss my family.”
The other wives have confessionals of their own here, talking about how they feel lonely too even though they all still have children that live at home.
Janelle says that she does try to reach out to Meri with a text or a phone call every once in a while, but that she has been talking and hanging out with Christine quite a bit.
For Kody’s turn, he says that one good thing about plural marriage is supposed to be that no one is ever truly lonely, but that’s definitely not the case right now for the Browns.
“My relationship with Meri is not the type of relationship where I’m going to talk with her every day,” he says of his wife of 31 years, “and my best guess is that her sister wives don’t feel like having an interaction with her daily either.”
Back on Meri’s hike, she reveals that she and Kody had a conversation recently that “just kinda came down to that we’re friends. Which I guess is a good thing. It’s a good thing.”
“I don’t know, I guess I just kind of had hope for more than that,” she adds.
In another confessional — Meri is right that she’s been very alone during all of this, so most of her scenes seem to be just her having conversations with the camera in different settings — she references another conversation that she had with Kody.
“Kody has said some things to me more recently that leads me to believe that, you know, there’s no repairing our relationship,” she says. “There are days that I get very, very discouraged, but then there’s days that I have so much hope.”
“If I quit, if I walk away, then it’s not gonna get better,” she reasons.
“I’m not going anywhere, y’all, you’re stuck with me,” she laughs. “Whether you like it or not!”
It’s so heartbreaking that Meri is here saying that she doesn’t want to leave because she’s just hoping that someday things get better while Kody is apparently directly telling her that he doesn’t think it ever will.
Like, he feels comfortable enough to get on national television and say that he doesn’t feel like even talking to her that often — what’s the point in trying to salvage that kind of relationship?
How long do you think Meri can actually put up with this?