The Sister Wives family could be expanding. While star Kody Brown‘s marriage with his first wife, Meri, has hit a rough patch, he is considering the possibility of having more children with his fourth wife, Robyn. He explained to Us Weekly that ultimately it’s up to Robyn. “That’s really up to her, but it’s always fun to sit here and fill my youth going, ‘I can have kids if I want to,’” the 52-year-old polygamist explained. “I do that to my adult children sometimes. It’s not cool to Robyn. She’s like, ‘Oh, this jerk is doing it again.’ And I’m like, ‘I can have more kids if I want to. I might have kids younger than your kids,’ stuff like that. It’s more, like, a dumb thing where I’m just challenging the kids and I’m teasing them.”
Brown has 18 children and three grandchildren with his four wives, Meri, Jenelle, Christine, and Robyn. Brown and Robyn got legally married in 2010 so that he could adopt her three children from a previous marriage. Whether or not they have more children is a decision they have to make together, according to Robyn. “Personally, I think it’s up to Robyn, but whenever I ask her, she always goes, ‘Well, it’s up to us. We make this decision together,’” Brown told Us Weekly.
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While Brown is thinking of having kids with one of his wives, his relationship to another is breaking down. In the Feb. 28 episode of Sister Wives, Brown revealed that his relationship with Meri has hit an extremely rough patch. “My relationship with Meri is — at best — just distant and amicable,” Kody explained in the episode. “The relationship between he and I, it’s gone.” Meri agreed. “It’s dead. It’s over.”
Brown doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing the emotional legwork to improve things between them either. “For all my marriage with Meri, I felt like she unloads her emotions into a burden that I’m supposed to carry,” he said. “I’m not carrying this burden, because there’s no reason that I should. I haven’t put effort into that relationship specifically because I have three other relationships that are rewarding and wholesome with children that need me [and] need to see me.”
He expressed a similar sentiment to Us Weekly in an exclusive interview. “Meri and I have been in a very dark place for a very long time. It’s been more about trying to get ourselves out of this hole that we dug ourselves into,” he explained. “I hope time heals things. I hope that some communication heals things. It’s been a long time and it’s been very difficult.”
Brown also said that even if he wanted to break things off with Meri, he wasn’t in a position to do so. “I have dominion over my own body and where I’m at but I’m not in a place where, like, I can say, ‘Hey, I’m divorcing you,’” Kody claimed. “I can’t do that. However, any one of them, I feel like, can. I feel like they need to understand that — that they can leave. If it’s not working for them, they can leave. Nobody’s going to be a prisoner here. … On its face, plural marriage is a double standard in some senses. There’s other double standards that we have in the family that we sort of tolerate. And that other double standard is I don’t get to leave, but they can.”
