Sister Wives' Kody Brown spoke up about his previous marraiges, specifically calling out the long-running issues that he had with his first wife, Meri Brown. Compared to his "normal relationship" with Robyn, he said that his past relationships were "terrible" but that he didn't realize that.
Kody Brown admitted that his relationship with first wife Meri Brown always had problems
Kody Brown married his first wife, Meri, in 1990 and the two of them were legally divorced in 2014 when Kody chose to legally marry Robyn, but stayed together for nearly a decade after that until Meri was the last wife to announce her departure from their plural relationship in 2023. Despite the fact that the two of them were the longest running relationship in the family, Kody Brown recently admitted that the two of them should have broken up a long time ago.
"This marriage was on the rocks the entire marriage," Kody said of his relationship with Meri on the most recent episode of Sister Wives. "And how would I know that? Because I had such a better relationship with Janelle, with Christine, with Robyn, and Janelle and Christine didn't survive."
According to Kody, his relationships with all three of the women he married after Meri were stronger connections than the relationship he had with Meri and yet, only one of those relationships is still standing. Kody admits during the episode that though he was married to Meri for 33 years but that he should have ended their relationship "25 years ago."
Meri didn't agree with Kody's thoughts on their marriage. Although Meri was the one to initiate ending their relationship through the church, she confronts Kody directly during the episode about their breakup.
When Kody tells her she should have left their marriage sooner than she did Meri tells him, "My choice was always to stay. Had I wanted to leave sooner, I would have left sooner."
According to Kody, he didn't realize that his relationships were having problems until after they ended
According to Kody, it's hard to tell how bad a relationship is until after you're out of the bad relationship. Kody says that his relationship with his last remaining wife, Robyn, is a "normal relationship" and that being in a relationship with a real, intimate connection has given him a new perspective on his past relationships.
"You just think you're in a normal relationship because all your friends have the same problem until you're in a normal relationship that has deep emotional intimacy," Kody said after saying that he didn't make the decision to "discard" any of his past relationships.
In an emotional scene that leaves Meri speechless, Kody says that the thing that's worse than divorce is "marrying the wrong person." After Meri questions the statement, he quickly backtracks and tries to insist that Meri wasn't the wrong person and says that he can't "philsophize" whether or not she was right for him, but that they had "different timestamps" on when they stopped being happy in their marriage.
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