There was so much to go through during Part 1 of the Sister Wives One-on-One Special.
When Meri Brown revealed that she hadn’t been with Kody in 10 years, viewers were astonished.
But we already knew that there had been a secret between Meri and Kody that they kept from the others.
That secret makes Meri’s revelation even more personal, painful, and heartbreaking.
Going ten years without sex is a long time for anyone who is interested in it.
Not having sex for that long while married is a tall order. It just seems crueler, somehow.
And there’s something that must have made Meri’s painful dry spell even sadder.
In her previous book, Meri shared that she and Kody got to know Robyn 16 years after Kody married Christine.
This was an unhappy time in their marriage, and they had found themselves struggling.
It was Meri who suggested that Kody begin to date Robyn.
Kody was all too happy to take Meri’s suggestion, but he didn’t go looking for other opinions from Janelle or Christine.
Instead, Kody kept his new romance a secret, telling only Meri.
At first, Meri reflected, sharing this scret kept them closer together — as “conspiracies” both big and small often do.
“Kody and I began to talk about her between ourselves,” Meri wrote in Becoming SIster Wives.
“It didn’t seem necessary to bring up the subject of Robyn to the rest of the family,” she explained.
At least, not “until it was more apparent that there might be a potential for courtship.”
Meri wrote that this secret about Robyn helped to give them “a sweet special bond in a time of turmoil between us.”
“Since things were rocky between Kody and me,” she explained, “it was a little unusual to consider bringing a new wife into the picture.”
Meri admitted that it was odd “especially given that I never, ever thought that Robyn would solve my problems with Kody.”
Once the other sister wives knew about it, Meri felt a strong reversal of the situation with Kody.
Instead of drawing them together, he was openly going on extended trips to date Robyn.
Even when he wasn’t physically off wooing her, she felt an emotional and mental distance as she occupied his thoughts.
Viewers have long perceived that Robyn received special treatment from Kody.
The two had a certain chemistry that Kody either failed to hide or didn’t bother hiding, and it was easy to detect even back then.
But what does this have to do with Meri’s revelation?
Well, we can all do the math on her extended period of unwelcome chastity.
One could conceivably play favorites among wives without totally neglecting one.
But Meri ended up being iced out of Kody’s bed, so to speak, within just a couple of years of him getting with Robyn.
That’s not Robyn’s fault, and to hear Kody tell it, he and Meri were simply a “bad match” and intimacy with her would be “emotional torture.”
But he can’t blame his reluctance to be with Meri on her catfishing scandal, because that only happened after years without sex.
The detail about how Meri helped him and Robyn get together? Well, that’s just salt in the wound for Meri. It’s heartbreaking.