- Kody told Christine that he “wasn’t attracted” to her on their wedding day.
- On Sunday’s season premiere of “Sister Wives,” they decided their marriage was over.
- “I can probably count on my hand how many times he told me I was actually beautiful,” Christine said.
Kody Brown confessed to his then-wife Christine Brown that he “wasn’t attracted” to her when they got married on the season 17 premiere of TLC’s “Sister Wives,” which premiered on Sunday.
The episode — aptly called “It’s Over” — took place the first time Kody saw Christine after she moved his belongings into the garage, which we saw Kody discover during the season 16 finale. It featured the couple rehashing the hard times in their marriage and ultimately agreeing that they were going to separate.
“OK, so we can unravel this further because it’s true that I wasn’t attracted to you when we got married,” Kody said in the middle of the conversation. Christine looked on in shock as Kody continued. “I felt pressured into the marriage. I did not know better at the time,” he said.
The former couple had a “spiritual” wedding ceremony on March 25, 1994. They both practiced a fundamentalist Mormon faith and believed in plural marriage at the time. Kody was already legally married to his first wife Meri and spiritually married to his second wife Janelle.
TLC
They’ve talked about being underwhelmed by their wedding day on “Sister Wives” before, though neither of them admitted that they were feeling unsure about the step they were taking.
On Sunday’s episode, Kody called the circumstances under which they married “not romantic” though he said, “it felt like we were following through with a destiny.” Christine said their union felt romantic to her.
They agreed that they did build a good marriage for many years after that. Still, much of the conversation revolved around the fact that Kody said his attraction to Christine began to dwindle when he realized that she was mistreating some of her sister wives.
“I had all these criteria I had to meet in order for him to be attracted to me,” Christine said in an interview. “Can we just say then that it’s over? If I have to meet all these criteria in order for him to be attracted to me, I just can’t be myself.”
She said she knows she hasn’t been the best friend to some of her sister wives because she gets “jealous” of women who have better marriages with Kody than she does.
The core problem of their relationship from Christine’s perspective had nothing to do with how she treats her sister wives. “I can probably count on my hand how many times he told me I was actually beautiful,” Christine said in an interview.
Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
“Being married to you has been heartache. And it’s been pain,” she told Kody. “Because I’ve tried for so long, so hard to be what you needed and to do everything that I could do to make it so you would want to be around me.”
Kody responded in his solo interview by saying his heart had been broken for “years” because of Christine’s “complaints and hatred of plural marriage.” He said the reason he doesn’t feel “attracted” to her is because he feels “betrayed” by her.
Christine said in an interview that Kody has a “favorite wife,” presumably referring to his fourth wife Robyn, whom he married in 2014.
When Christine plainly said that she didn’t want to be married to him anymore, Kody said he accepted that because “nobody’s a prisoner here.” They publicly announced their split in November.
New episodes of “Sister Wives” air Sundays at 10 p.m. on TLC.