Although Christine Brown believes she is spiritually divorced from Kody Brown, her former sister wife Robyn doesn’t think the divorce is legit because it wasn’t done through the church.
Kody Brown seems to no longer be actively participating in the polygamous lifestyle when it comes to love and romance. Though he still may consider himself to be spiritually married to three women at this point, he has expressed that he has no desire for romantic love or any sort of intimate bond with Meri. When he told Christine he no longer wanted intimacy from her, she ultimately decided to leave him. For a while, viewers didn’t know where Kody stood with his second wife Janelle, but he is now making it clear that he is not in love, or “in sync” with her. He has previously revealed that he took “romance” off the table for Janelle, and now she’s saying that they are “good friends” in a committed relationship.
Meri Brown revealed on Part 1 of the Sister Wives One-on-One special that airs tonight (Sunday, January 30, 2021) that she has not had a physical relationship with Kody in over 10 years, which is years before the Catfish scandal. Neither Kody nor Meri have gone into detail about why their relationship first broke apart, but they are both adamant that it was before the Catfish situation. In their 2015 book Becoming Sister Wivesthey didn’t go into their relationship problems much either, but for a brief period Kody and Meri shared a secret they kept from the other two original wives. The secret brought them together at first, but only managed to tear them further apart.
Season 16 of Sister Wives ended with the muddled dissolution of Kody and Christine’s 25-year marriage. We were left with Christine declaring that the end of their spiritual marriage was between “her and God,” while Kody is grappling with feelings of relief after finding all of his things packed up in the garage. Something else, however, was left hanging for the viewers. Janelle revealed that her sons Garrison and Gabriel had tested positive for COVID after not feeling well. She and her daughter Savannah were waiting on test results, but the audience got no more updates from Janelle.
The divorce between Kody Brown and his third wife Christine Brown seems to have been going on for a long time before it was officially announced. Because they were never married legally, the idea of divorce is really up to how they define it spiritually for them. What does this mean for their religious beliefs? Where they formally divorced in a religious ceremony? Christine has revealed what divorce means to her.
During Season 8 of Sister Wives, the Brown family took a multi-stop road trip where Kody was invited to go fishing with his friend Ken. Christine was upset with this friend because he told Kody to divorce three of his wives, and she demanded that Kody ask for an apology from him. This angers Kody, and bad feelings ripple through the whole family. Eventually, Kody shifts the blame to Christine’s PMS so they can continue on with their trip.
On tonight’s episode of Sister Wives Kody reveals that Christine has an “employee.” He drops this in while talking about how their COVID precautions have an “economic” angle in that some of them have people they work with that could be exposed. This seems to be some sort of retaliation for the fact that Christine outed that he and Robyn had a nanny coming in and out of the home, who Kody called an “employee.” Linking the word “employee” to both situations, especially surrounding COVID protocols, implies that Christine also had someone coming in and out of her home too. It turns out that Christine’s employee does remote work for her MLM businesses and is not a nanny or housekeeper that comes into her home, so it isn’t comparable to Robyn’s employee.
On Sister Wives Kody Brown has made it clear that he expects his four wives to choose their relationship with him over their children. He went so far as to say he wanted to evict two of his children, Garrison and Gabriel, from their mother’s home without her consent. Kody is not on the lease, so has no grounds to do so, but is callously adamant about the wish for them to leave. The motivation for this is cloaked in strict COVID-19 rules that are meant to protect the family, but the issue seems to be about something else entirely.
Kody Brown’s slide into utter disharmony with his family continues with Sunday night’s episode of Sister Wives. In the episode, Kody says he wants to evict his sons Garrison and Gabe from Janelle’s house and tries to explain why he’s being so Draconian with his rules: he says he’s going to hate “a bunch of” people in his family if one of them dies from COVID. He then brings up that he thinks one of the reasons Christine hates him is because she thinks he was negligent with Truely when she developed life-threatening kidney failure in 2014.
The COVID-19 pandemic has completely decimated the Sister Wives‘ Brown family, not necessarily because of strict precautions and rules but because of a lack of communication, compassion, and commitment to getting creative maintaining relationships. On this week’s episode, the Brown spouses finally got together talked about some of the specific COVID rules that Kody wants everyone to abide by in order for family members to interact. Keep reading for the complete list!
In the past two seasons of Sister Wives Kody Brown has been very open about his lack of affection, or even friendship, with his first wife Meri Brown. He was pretty direct with her on their 30th wedding anniversar. In the latest episode, Meri revealed that Kody had finally told her that they are “just friends” and let her know that there was no hope to repair their broken relationship. Still, Meri is persistent in staying in the spiritual marriage and the family. “I’m not going anywhere, y’all,” she says. “You’re stuck with me.”
“You have a nanny over. She’s over all the time. I don’t understand why Ysabel can’t come over and hang out. She’s devastated,” Christine tells Kody in a preview for next week’s Sister Wives. In interview, Christine pointedly asks “What does the nanny do?”