Kody and Meri Brown’s relationship is dissected during the Jan. 30 episode of ‘Sister Wives,’ and Christine makes it clear that she wants out before her situation with Kody becomes like Meri’s.
The Jan. 30 episode of Sister Wives was the first of three episodes featuring one-on-one sit downs with Kody Brown and his four wives. This week mostly featured talk about Kody’s strict COVID-19 policies and how it took a toll on the family. Christine Brown and Janelle Brown took the biggest issue with Kody’s rules, and Christine reiterated why. “It’s not realistic,” she explained. “It’s just simply not. When we had the Zoom call together, Kody was like, ‘I can be the only one who goes from house to house.’ I have kids everywhere and I can’t. I cannot just stay home.”
Christine insisted that she and her family members followed the CDC guidelines that were put in place, but said that Kody’s rules took things to an extreme level. Meanwhile, Kody admitted that he may have taken things too far with his restrictions. “With hindsight, I might’ve been able to be more loose about it,” he said. “But every moment I was dealing with it, I was getting firmer in my resolve. My sole goal was to keep everybody alive, even if we were separated.”
Kody’s strained relationship with Meri Brown was also a hot topic. The pair’s relationship had taken a turn for the worst after Meri’s catfishing scandal in 2015. Meri had met a man online via social media and began talking to him via text for months. It wasn’t until six months later that she found out she was actually texting a woman on the other end of the line. “When Meri had an affair, she was leaving my a**,” Kody insisted. “She’s like, ‘I’m done with this, I’m done with you.’ She made it clear to everybody that she was getting out of there, she was done with us. But she can’t admit that now.”
Even though Meri and Kody’s relationship was nothing but a friendship at this point, Meri said that she wouldn’t leave Kody because he and the other wives were her family. She admitted that she and Kody hadn’t been physical in “about a decade,” and Kody admitted he would never be intimate with Meri again. “I’m not going to go through the emotional torture ever again,” he explained. “It’s just a bad match. If we weren’t in a plural marriage or felt religiously bound to stay together, things would have been a lot different a long time ago, probably. We’ll keep the best kind of relationship that we possibly can. I’m not telling her to go kick rocks down the road. I’m telling her to be part of the family.”‘
Seeing how things had gotten between Kody and Meri between the years struck a chord with Christine, who began to notice that her relationship was headed in the same direction. On this season of the show, Kody told her he no longer wanted an intimate marriage with her, which led her to move his things out of her home. “My heart breaks when I think about [Meri and Kody’s] marriage, and I don’t want that,” Christine insisted. “I don’t want to be in a loveless marriage. I have no intention of living like that. If that’s what my future looks like, I’m not going to live that way.”
Christine kept true to that promise and wound up leaving Kody during the fall of 2021, which has not played out on the show yet.