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The life that Kody Brown was once building as someone who sang the praise of plural marriage looks incredibly different now than it did back in 2010 when Sister Wives began airing on TLC. In the series premiere, Kody introduced the audience to his family, including his first three wives, Meri Brown, Janelle Brown, and Christine Brown. Kody then let the viewers know that he had been courting the woman who would become his fourth wife, Robyn Brown. The family spent the early seasons sharing their plural lifestyle and attempting to minimize the problems that arose in the marriages, for the sake of the many young children the family had at the time. Now, in Season 19, I continued to watch the gradual decline of Kody’s relationships with each of the sister wives. Season 18 saw the fall-out of Christine leaving the family and moving to Utah, and since that relationship deteriorated, it appears to me that everyone in the marriage has been reevaluating their attachment to the man who the family centered around for so many seasons.
Now it appears to me that Kody wants to re-write the narrative of his plural marriage, and the script looks significantly different from the life he has portrayed on the series for nearly two decades. The Season 19 trailer revealed that Kody now wants to speak a different truth about how he spends his time, and why he struggles to give his four wives equal attention. In a dire family argument, Kody is shown shouting at his first wife Meri that he wished he had never married her, a tune he had sung before when Christine moved to Utah in 2021, divorcing Kody and transferring the title of her plot on the family’s shared Coyote Pass investment property to him, in exchange for half the profit from the sale of her home. With the recent tragic passing of Janelle and Kody’s son, Garrison Brown, Janelle, too, has separated from Kody, after spending several seasons contemplating the change. Now Kody and Robyn remain together as a married monogamous couple, and Robyn shares in a confessional shown in the Season 19 trailer that she “feels like the idiot who’s left behind.”
As Season 19 begins to air, and especially as the family has to now navigate a tricky situation involving several divorces and a real-estate investment gone wrong, it is clear that this season will be largely about teasing out the truth in the competing narratives that arise from the wives and Kody’s very different perspectives on what happened in their relationships. It appears that Season 19 will also answer the question of how the family can move forward, if at all. As the ex-sister-wives continue to deal with the difficult choice to leave the marriage, they are still saddled with listening to the revisionist history that Kody is attempting to push onto all of them. The first episode of Season 19 makes clear that it is beyond time that the women in Sister Wives need to be set free from this situation.
What Went Wrong With a Plural Marriage?
From the start, the other wives were skeptical about how introducing a fourth wife would affect the dynamic that the family had established. Robyn moved to Lehi, Utah, in order to marry Kody and join the plural marriage, but instead of the family finding another large home they could all share, she instead kept a separate home from the other wives. This set-up a lasting divide, where the original three wives immediately and irreversibly felt like Kody was prioritizing his new wife over his old life. This led to jealousy and resentment building on both sides, and the gradual decline of the relationships within the plural marriage.
Once Christine left in Season 18, the family struggled even to come together for Christmas, as she was often the mother who planned the holiday for the entire family in past years. Christine sadly admitted, “We’re just not a family anymore.” Instead of sadness, Kody felt anger that he had spent so many years trying to satisfy Christine’s need for attention, only for her to divorce him and leave the family unit. He even acknowledged that the family had grown “dysfunctional,” saying he had reached a point where we thought, “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” This is a far cry from the man who had spent years seeking to legitimize plural marriage while singing its praises for nearly fifteen years on reality TV. In any marriage, divorce and separation make it challenging to keep a family together, so it is easy to imagine when there are several partners breaking off from a plural marriage, how much disruption it would bring to the once seemingly unified family on Sister Wives.
Christine’s Departure Was Just The Start
When the COVID pandemic occurred during Season 17 of Sister Wives, it seemingly exposed just how fractured the family had become. After Christine had issues with his choice to isolate Robyn and her young family, Kody made clear that he didn’t want an intimate marriage with her anymore. So she reclaimed her bedroom by moving Kody’s stuff into boxes stored in the garage. Robyn encouraged him to continue staying with Christine, sleep on the couch, be present and try to fix their relationship. But Kody insisted he was not willing to make the relationship work, especially on someone else’s terms. He stated out right that he didn’t like the idea of staying on the couch because “it gives Christine power over where I sleep.”
This is the confession of a man who cannot reconcile the thought of relinquishing the position of authority a patriarchal religious practice promised him. By breaking off from the family and taking control of her own life, Christine had flouted the deeply held convictions in their religious community that the husband is the authority in the home, and divorce is not an option. In order to seem in control of the narrative, Kody even went so far as to claim he had stopped being attracted to Christine because he felt betrayed by her apparent refusal to step into a nurturing role with Robyn’s kids, attacking her for both her desirability and her skills as a mother figure in the family. These were low blows, and it seemed clear to me he wanted to hurt Christine in any way possible. It’s little wonder that once it was obvious to her that Kody was no longer invested in their marriage, she felt the desire to leave the family in Flagstaff, Arizona and move back to Utah, where she had a community of friends and family waiting.
Janelle took the loss of Christine to heart, and her relationship with Kody never recovered. She continued to question the way that he divided his time with his wives, seeming to prioritize Robyn over everyone else. Meri was still hanging on as a mediator, trying to keep the wives on the same page even as her relationship with Kody continued to grow more distant. When talking about what went wrong at Christmas in Season 18, Robyn was upset that the other wives were abandoning the plural family she signed up for. When Robyn suggested to Meri that Christine and Janelle should be pursuing counseling to fix their marriage with Kody, rather than leaving, Meri astutely observed that both parties in each marriage needed to be willing to work on the relationship, implying that Kody was no longer putting in that effort either. I feel that Kody’s inability to manage his time in a way that appeases each of his wives has once again reared its head as a definite problem in the relationship.
The ‘Sister Wives’ Need to Be Set Free
In Season 19, Kody begins to reveal how he truly thinks and feels about the plural marriage that has featured on the series. In the Season 19 trailer, he made the outrageous claim that he wished he had never married Meri. In Season 1, he had referred to Meri on multiple occasions as “the bait” that attracted him to the plural lifestyle in the first place, since she came from a religious family that also promoted plural marriage. Essentially, Kody has always shifted any blame for the lifestyle towards Meri, claiming he had simply been so attracted to her at the start of their relationship, that she had lured him down the path to plural marriage. For Kody to claim now in Season 19 that he wishes he had never married Meri is shocking. Either Kody is an exceptional liar, living a false life for the last 15 years and fooling Meri into believing he loved her, or Kody is an exceptional liar, now telling the world he never actually loved her, only to mask the pain he feels from his plural family falling apart.
This is the same rewriting of history I saw when he was trying to shift the blame to Christine for the end of their relationship in 2021. At that time, Kody had claimed in a conversation with his now ex-wife that he had never been attracted to her, even before they said “I do.” He went so far as to say he felt “pressured” into the marriage and that he “did not know better at the time.” Kody has developed a pattern of contradicting himself, especially when he is trying to convince one of his wives that something he has done wrong is actually their fault. To say he didn’t know any better, and that he felt pressured into the relationship completely contradicts the way Kody spoke about his life in the initial seasons of the series.
To change the narrative now to say that he had never loved Meri or wanted to be married to her not only reveals him to be a liar, but also proves that he has been the problem with their plural marriage all along. It is clear that the Sister Wives are capable of carrying the series with or without Kody’s particular brand of patriarchy weighing them down. In Season 19, Meri has already stated in the first episode that she is determined to tell her side of the story, especially, it seems, in light of the lies that Kody is now attempting to spread about their relationship. Now it appears there are rumors of a new romance on the horizon. Christine already has a new romance on the series, and her family life in Utah offers wholesome and cheery scenes that are reminiscent of earlier, happier, days within the family. The ladies’ ability to carry on filming the series completely separated from the patriarch is proof that the Sister Wives should be set free to find happier lives now that their life together no longer centers around Kody.
Season 19 of Sister Wives airs Sundays on TLC. Past seasons are available to stream on Max.
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