‘Sister Wives’: Kody and Meri Brown Were Courting a 17-Year-Old Girl Before Janelle
In the Sister Wives’ 2012 memoir, Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage, Christine Brown reveals Kody Brown’s first courtship was with a 17-year-old girl. Just a year after getting married, Kody and Meri Brown met the teenager at their church who they thought would be a perfect sister wife, but they had to wait for her to turn of age before they could get engaged.
Meri and Kody’s first courtship with a teenager failed
After Kody and Meri’s first year of marriage, Meri revealed that she and Kody started courting a 17-year-old girl for a potential 2nd wife. Since Meri and Kody were married in 1990, Meri would be 20 years old, and Kody would have been 21 years old. Meri explained how they met this girl in the family’s memoir:
“When Kody and I entered into our first courtship with a young woman we’d been introduced to at a church gathering, I was excited. She and I became close friends right away.
This was unusual for me and I immediately took it as a sign that Kody and I were destined to marry her. This girl and I loved hanging out together and spent lots of time on our own without Kody. As I saw it, we were on our way to achieving the sister wife ideal I’d always imagined.”
Meri Brown
Christine Brown reveals Meri and Kody’s potential sister wife was only 17 years old
Meri didn’t reveal the name or the age of the “girl” they were courting as a second wife. But in Christine’s chapter about how she came to be Kody’s 3rd wife, she revealed the girl’s age. Christine said that Meri and Kody planned to propose to the girl but were waiting for her to come of age. Check out the passage below:
“Even though I’d cut myself off from a lot of my friends, Meri and I still talked on the phone from time to time. I resisted these phone calls because I didn’t want to hear about the courtship.
It had been prolonged because Kody and Meri wanted to wait for the girl they were courting to turn eighteen before making their engagement official. Even though I wanted nothing to do with it, I heard when they got engaged, and I knew when they set the date for the wedding.”
Christine Brown
Meri felt betrayed by the potential sister wife calling off the engagement to Kody
After their engagement, the potential 2nd sister wife was now 18 years old when she decided to call off her engagement. Meri didn’t reveal why the girl left Kody, but Meri did say that she felt “personally betrayed” by the breakup.
“But things didn’t work out. I was devastated when the courtship soured and she left. Back then we were all so young — she was only eighteen, and Kody and I were in our first year of marriage — so we may have mistaken a crush for love.
Nevertheless, I felt personally betrayed. I had lost one of my closest friends, a woman I imagined would have been a perfect sister wife.”
Meri Brown
As of now, the woman Kody and Meri courted is still a mystery. It would be interesting to know why she ended her engagement with Kody.
New episodes of Sister Wives Season 17 air Sundays at 10 p.m. EST on TLC.
