'Sister Wives': Kody Brown Says He Doesn't Consider Himself Married to Meri, Gives Her His Blessing to Move On

While Kody Brown might still be reeling in the aftermath of his split from third wife, Christine Brown, he doesn't seem to be particularly attached to his first wife, Meri Brown, in the new mid-season trailer for Sister Wives. 

As the family prepares to say goodbye to Christine, Meri seems to be taking the news of Christine's move particularly hard. 

"I'm feeling betrayed. I can't imagine what Kody's feeling," Meri tells her fellow sister wife, Robyn Brown. 

Meri sarcastically adds of Christine in an aside interview, "Congratulations, you're leaving the family. I don't know what I'm supposed to say to this."

And while his marriage to Janelle appears to be in jeopardy this season, Kody doesn't seem to be concerned with his marriage to Meri. In fact, he says he doesn't even consider them to be married. 

"I don't really consider myself married to Meri," he says in an aside interview. "If she wanted to move on and marry another, she wouldn't get an argument from me."

Robyn warns in an aside interview that all of Kody's marriages are hanging in the balance as the family tries to recover from Christine's exit. 

"He still has marriages with us, and he still has to fix them or he's going to ruin every single one of them," she says. 

Meri and Kody have been living separately and without intimacy in their marriage since her 2015 cat fishing scandal in which she entered into an online relationship with someone she thought to be a man but who turned out to be a woman. Though Kody previously described his marriage to Meri as "amicable" but "estranged," he's also made it clear that he doesn't seem to have much of an attachment to her. On this season of the TLC reality series, Meri's mother, Bonnie, died, leaving Meri to run her family's bed-and-breakfast in Utah, which is five hours away. In a recent episode, Kody suggested that Meri move to Utah to run the inn, which she took offense to. 

"Kody actually said to me the other day, he said, 'Why don't you just move up there?' So I'm like, 'Uhh, that was not my intention,'" Meri said. "I told him I didn't want to. I told him I had no intention of doing that, and he was kind of surprised. He's like, 'Oh, really?' I guess I'm just still in this place with him or he's in this place where he thinks the point of me buying this was to get away and that saddens me a lot."

Kody defended his comments, saying, "The reason I'm suggesting this to Meri is because honestly, as a family anymore it doesn't feel like we interact that much. I'm not even trying to push her away. She's laying this burden that she has at my feet about this struggle she has about what to do with Lizzie's Heritage Inn now that her mom's passed. And I'm like, here's a solution for you."

ET's Deidre Behar recently spoke with Christine about the status of her relationships with Kody's wives, and she said that she no longer has a relationship with Meri. 

"I won't be close with Meri anymore, not really. We're just very different," Christine told ET. "I won't be having much to do with Meri so much. I wish her the best. I wish her all the happiness in the world, of course. Whatever she needs, I hope she gets that. I just don't see that there's a friendship for us."

Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC. 

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