Sister Wives’ Meri Brown Claims Attempts to Save Kody Marriage Weren’t ‘Good Enough’

Sister Wives stars Kody Brown and Meri Brown revealed they weren’t on the same page regarding how he felt about her during their marriage.

Meri, 52, admitted she felt her “loyalty” wasn’t valued by Kody, 54, throughout their relationship during the December 1 episode of Sister Wives: One on One.

“He said he did, you know, years ago,” she explained to host Sukanya Krishnan. “I don’t think what he saw, he valued.”

She then claimed she did everything she could to fulfill Kody’s requests in an attempt to save their relationship, but it wasn’t enough.

“He would ask me to do things and asked me to be a certain way or asked me to fix the situation or ask me to share some information with him,” the TLC personality recalled. “All these things to be able to fix a relationship and I did every one of the things that he asked me to.”

Despite all of her efforts to keep Kody happy, Meri said “it just wasn’t good enough.”

After stating that Kody wasn’t “emotionally available” to her, she said it felt like a “knife in my kidneys” to see the way he valued his other wives. Meri then laughed at the analogy, which was a reference to a confrontation Kody had with Christine Brown when she announced her decision to leave him.

Later on in the episode, Kody insisted that he chose to “love” Meri and “be romantic.” However, he was never “head over heels” in love with his first wife.

“It was not that experience for me,” the father of 18 explained. “But I was always a life-affirming person. I would always affirm what I wanted and so I told her and did everything I could to love her. She thinks we were mad about each other and … we played that out.”

Kody continued, “We did have a very romantic experience. We started out that way, but there was a lot of dysfunction that we had.”

“It’s not safe for me,” he added. “Make up, any bulls–t you want, but I’m telling you, I’m not gonna sit here and drive the bus over her, because this is sad. It’s heartbreaking. It just didn’t work.”

Meri and Kody legally tied the knot in 1990. The former couple – who share child Leon – divorced in 2014 so that he could marry Robyn Brown and adopt her children from a previous relationship. Despite their legal separation, they remained in a spiritual marriage until earlier this year.

The mother of one hinted that she and Kody called it quits during a December 2022 episode of Sister Wives: One on One, though the pair didn’t confirm their split until January.

“In light of a recent unapproved press release, we feel compelled to share our own truth, in our own way and in our own timing,” Kody and Meri said in a joint statement shared via Instagram on January 10. “After more than a decade of working on our relationship in our own unique ways, we have made the decision to permanently terminate our marriage relationship.”