Kody Brown Admits He Once Considered ‘Walking Away’ from Robyn

The downsides to plural marriage took center stage on Sister Wives‘ latest episode.

Valentine’s Day was in full swing on Sunday, April 27 episode of the hit TLC series. And naturally, Brown family members Kody Brown, Meri Brown, Janelle Brown, Christine Brown and Robyn Brown were in reflection mode.

Kody, for one, had an interesting outlook on marriage after enduring three divorces in a 14-month period. “My church isn’t a cult. It’s hard to get into an easy to get out of, but marriage is its own cult. I don’t want to disparage marriage, but it is easy to get into and it is hard to get out of,” the 56-year-old told the cameras.

Later, Kody was shown taking Robyn, 46, to a Valentine’s Day dinner, where she asked him how he felt about no longer being a polygamist. Kody told Robyn he felt as if he’d been “slapped by polygamy.”

“It’s hard not to be bitter about the fact that I bought off on it and did it because in the end, in the last moments of it, it felt terrible,” he said. “I’m like, literally bitter sometimes.”

After Robyn asked if he was “missing what it was before” the demise occurred, Kody said that it was a “loaded” question.

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“I don’t want to be flippant with my answer because we were devoted to this, but I’m not interested in plural marriage anymore,” he then explained to the cameras. “I don’t want to pursue another woman because I don’t want that headache, the questions, the struggles, the wonder about trust. I’m not in that space.”

Kody then told Robyn that he “can’t deny” that his children are a “blessing” that’s come out of plural marriage, but he’s “completely discouraged by the idea that people feel obligated to do what we did.” Meanwhile, Robyn said she’s been “heartbroken by all of this and trying to make sense of it.”

However, she later told the cameras separately that she’s now “very scared of plural marriage” because of “what has happened” to her family, adding that “there’s a lot of like trauma there.”

Despite Kody’s initial challenges navigating life as a monogamous man after living as a polygamist for decades, he confidently told Robyn he feels “at peace” with where they now are as a couple. Yet, that wasn’t always the case for him.

“Because I’ve been in plural marriage for so long and it was a sole focus of marriage for me, when we failed at it, I was sabotaging myself,” he explained. “There were days unfair to Robyn that I thought about just walking away from our relationship, too. And that was just because I was so broken, I became self-destructive.”

Looking back on the ways he attempted to sabotage his relationship with Robyn, Kody actually apologized to her “for the dark space I went through and how it harmed you because it wasn’t fair to you.”

“Because I was angry, you’re withdrawing from me. And because you were withdrawing from me, I was experiencing not just the anger from the rejection and the anger from the failure of our failures in plural marriage and everything that I was experiencing there, it was causing me to literally have bad thoughts about us.”

At a different point in the episode, Robyn shared what she felt was something that wasn’t beneficial to her marriage.

“This was something that [Kody, Meri, Janelle and Christine] decided before I even came in the family to not show affection in front of each other. I always saw it as a mistake,” she recalled. “I think it made Kody feel alone, and I think it made each of us wives feel kind of alone.”

Robyn noted that affection “brings comfort to the couple,” adding, “It makes the couple feel kind of safe and secure. And in plural marriage, there’s a lot of insecurity just because there’s so much sharing.”

“It would have made each wife feel more secure and more comfortable if Kody would have been able to show affection or we would have been able to show affection to him,” she concluded.

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