Sister Wives star Kody Brown is plunging the knife into his own kidneys.
Because after years of putting the end of his first three marriages onto ex-wives Meri Brown, Janelle Brown and Christine Brown, he’s admitting that, yes, you can blame him for not loving them enough. Even if he was doing his duty.
“I feel like that it is my fault,” he acknowledged in a confessional during the TLC series’ Nov. 2 episode. “I need to own the failure of the family. This is wise because I was the leader.”
And at certain point he was left with just one follower—fourth and sole remaining wife Robyn Brown.
“Certain parties just went, ‘I just don’t want to do this anymore,'” Kody detailed. “Like, literally Christine and I had come to this point where we just couldn’t figure it out. And I regret that. It’s a huge regret to me because I could have been a leader there too.”
“The crazy thing,” he explained while discussing one missive in particular, is that “Robyn and I are talking about plural marriage, another wife hypothetically coming in, and I’m going, ‘Uh, no. Because how you do anything is how you do everything. And we’ll screw that one up too.”
TLCIn fact, he no longer really sees the value in multiplying his love.
“Anytime you have two entities, one is going to outshine, the other,” Kody noted in a confessional, reflecting on how hard he fell for Robyn decades after his first three unions. “I mean, let’s just be really honest. Could I fairly love all of these women? I wanted to. I really tried to. I even faked it. But in the end, it just wasn’t going to work.”
The realization had him questioning why any woman would choose polygamy.
Robyn’s answer boiled down to the opportunity to have something really special. The intention, she said, was “having that community of women that had the same goal. That wasn’t something that I really experienced a whole lot of.”
Her dream, she continued, was “to have us sitting here at the table like we were when we would have our little meetings and for you to be able to say in front of the other wives, ‘Hey, babe, I got you. I’m going to make sure your needs are met.'”
Had Kody been able to say “‘I need you all to know individually and collectively that I love each of you. And that I have each of your backs,'” she added, “How beautiful would that have been?”
But for Kody, that was less of a sweet, sweet fantasy, and more “a confirmation of my own failures,” he explained to Robyn. “It’s like, yeah, it would have been nice to have had the skill set to have managed those relationships better. But I didn’t.”
That’s not to say the dad of 18 couldn’t learn some new tricks.
“I failed, and I’ve spent three years getting angry about it,” he noted to his bride. But if he could uncover the slimmest of silver linings, he’d acknowledged that “maybe it’s a good lesson right now.”
The way he saw it, Kody continued, “Those relationships are still hostile. And maybe it’s smart for me to start figuring out a way to defuse the hostility now.”
It was one of many deep thoughts he and his wives (both past and current) have shared this season. Keep reading to parse through all their recent revelations.
