This post has lots of pictures, so some email clients won’t handle it well. You can also read it at the Substack website.
This was paywalled when originally published in December 2022 and is about both the trashy reality show and polyamory more generally. The season 18 “tell all” episodes are airing now, and I’ve added an update at the bottom of this post that will be of special interest to people who enjoy my friend Josh Slocum’s Disaffected podcast or otherwise have an interest in Cluster B disorders.
What Is Sister Wives?
TLC started a reality show in 2010 about a fundamentalist Mormon family, who practice polygamy. They are not the Warren Jeffs, prairie-dress-wearing types. They send their kids—including their daughters—to get educations, use the internet, and in other respects actually live in the modern era.
Why Polyamory/Polygamy Fascinates Me
Yes, I am using the terms interchangeably. In the United States, nobody can have more than one legal marriage at a time, so all “polygamous” really means is that they use the term “wife,” defining it in their own way. I’ve known quite a few polyamorous people, and the only difference I can see between them and the people on this show is that the people on this show hold a “spiritual wedding” ceremony between dating and having sex.
This dynamic fascinates me for several reasons.
First, non-monogamy has become so normalized that it’s the baseline assumption that I and other women run into while dating. When saying no to dates with guys with ENM (ethical non-monogamy) in their profiles on that basis, the immediate assumption was always some kind of profound insecurity or lack of sophistication—that the only explanation for wanting to be in an exclusive relationship is some kind of unresolved trauma, being religious, or simple prudery.
Second, while I would never, ever want this situation for myself, there is one aspect of it that I find appealing. I am very independent and well-suited to living alone. That the wives in this situation have a husband 1-2 nights a week only appeals to me. If I ever get involved in a serious way with anyone, I expect it to be someone who is career-focused and with whom I spend, perhaps, Friday and Saturday nights, parting ways midday Sunday, perhaps getting together for dinner once during the week. That would be ideal, I think.
Third, I regard the philosophy undergirding their lifestyle as akin to Communism, which works brilliantly on paper but breaks down once it’s put into actual practice. On paper, this lifestyle curbs the worst excesses of both sexes and forces them to become better than they are. The women must overcome jealousy and insecurity. The men must take on an astonishing amount of responsibility and develop emotional literacy in order to meet so many needs, of wives and many children. The women are rewarded with extra security (more incomes, more adults around to help) and autonomy; the men with sexual variety and novelty.
In real life, it’s just a great big mess, start to finish.
Finally, it’s just a really interesting situation—so much human drama, so many relationships, so many moving parts. I majored in mathematics and minored in psychology. A family like this is a sort of living calculus problem, ha ha!
Here is the story of the Sister Wives family, the most famous polyamory scenario in the US right now, and what I’ve learned from it.
Important: if you or someone you know is polyamorous and everything is wonderful and they’re all super healthy and it’s not like this at all, great! Hip hip hooray! Supply your own #notalls — I don’t care and don’t need to hear about it.
Guide to the Characters
The husband is Kody Brown, a man in his early 50s.
In a three-year period during the early 1990s, he married three women: Meri, Janelle, and Christine. This is going to get complicated, so I will use the numbers as well as the names to help keep it all straight. Crucially, in my view, they were all roughly the same age and all three of the women married Kody before any of the children were born.
Between the three wives, Kody had thirteen children. One from Meri (#1), six from Janelle (#2), and six from Christine (#3).
The family lived in a large house specifically designed for polygamist families; three separate apartments with interconnected space in the middle. Thus the kids grew up as siblings, in the same house, but each wife had her own living space, including kitchen, and a measure of autonomy. Floor plan graphic:
To all appearances, the family had a workable dynamic for close to twenty years. Kody and Janelle (#2) were both career-focused, working many hours to bring in the income needed to support such a large family. Janelle (#2) was the family financial manager. Christine (#3) stayed home and raised all the kids, including homeschooling for several years. Meri (#1), with only one child, did a bit of everything—working part-time and helping with the kids part-time.
The entire family shared meals and prayers/devotions several times a week, and the kids very much grew up as siblings, not cousins or more distant relatives. There is obviously no way to be sure of this, but to all appearances, the family was functional, the kids got their needs met, and the wives were reasonably satisfied.
In 2009-2010, Kody began dating and eventually married Robyn (#4), who brought with her three children from a failed first marriage. That brings the total family size up to one husband and four wives with a total of sixteen children at the time of Robyn’s marriage.
Kody and Robyn (#4) had two more children, and Kody later adopted her first three kids. That brings the total count of chlidren in the family up to its present eighteen children.
After the show began airing and the fact that they were in violation of Utah law about polygamy was made quite plain, the family left Utah and moved to Las Vegas. After some time apart, they bought four houses in a cul de sac, which was a nearly ideal situation, the second-best-possible (with a shared one-house, as they had in Utah for so long, being the best).
The Trajectory of the Show
The trajectory of the show has been towards Kody becoming a monogamist, solely devoted to Robyn (#4), and tragically losing interest in all his other children.
In the first couple of seasons, the family slowly adjusted to the new wife and new children.
There were a lot of problems blending the family, as is almost always the case when blending families, but in the case of this family, a dynamic began to emerge that was noticed by almost everyone on all the fan forums.
There are times, I’ve found, when the mainstream opinion about a show is something that seems crazy to me, and other times when it seems accurate. I came to my conclusion slowly, but in this case, the overwhelming fan “take” for the last twelve years has been proven unambiguously correct.
That being: that Kody may have loved Meri (#1), Janelle (#2), and Christine (#3), but he was never in love. He never formed an intense attachment of the sort most marriages are based on.
When he met Robyn (#4), he fell in love for the very first time. Robyn (#4) is also submissive, obedient, and extremely deferential to Kody in a way that the other wives never have been, and this is a dynamic that Kody seems to prefer, implicitly in the beginning but now quite explicitly.
His preference for Robyn (#4) and her kids has slowly become more and more obvious, including tells like referring to “our kids” when talking about Robyn’s kids, but “Janelle’s kids” and “Christine’s kids.”
Mostly, the trajectory has been of a man slowly coming to understand that there is such a thing as a soulmate, and he made the royal fuck-up of finding his only after committing to three other women and making thirteen babies with them.
When The Trajectory Picked Up Speed
Meri (#1), at roughly the same time, had three major events happening in her life. Her only child had gone away to college, but she alone was experiencing an empty nest syndrome. She fell victim to a “catfish” situation with an internet friend with whom she had an emotional affair. And she decided to legally divorce Kody—which is almost meaningless in their religion, as their faith-based “spiritual marriages,” affirmed by their church authorities, are the ones that count—so that Kody and Robyn (#4) could legally marry and Kody could adopt Robyn’s three kids from her first marriage.
In the episode where this decision was presented to the other wives, Janelle (#2) confessed that it triggered insecurity for her, that “you and Robyn would ride off into the sunset.”
That is almost exactly what has happened.
Meri (#1) and Kody essentially stopped being married at this time, in that Meri (#1) stopped being given her turn for nights with Kody, and Kody has explicitly encouraged her to leave. She refuses, hanging on with a genuinely heartbreaking belief that Kody will one day love her again. He doesn’t initiate a spiritual divorce in their religion, for reasons he’s never been clear about, but has made it perfectly clear that they have no relationship now and never will again.
COVID Helped Kill A Family
When COVID happened, Kody reacted by instituting draconian rules. Christine (#3) and Janelle (#2) each had adult children living at home, and were simply not willing to require their kids to quit their jobs, only take online college courses, etc. They did not require their kids to stop everything in order to have their dad come over one or two nights a week. Kody made it an ultimatum, and they chose their kids over Kody. Robyn (#4) and her kids went into full-on COVID lockdown, spending twenty months doing nothing and going nowhere in order to be “respectful of their dad,” as Robyn (#4) described it.
Kody refused to spend time at their houses almost entirely, ostensibly in order to avoid catching COVID. This meant that suddenly he had an ironclad excuse to stay only at Robyn’s house with their kids, almost all the time.
The Straw That Broke Christine’s Back
Kody’s daughter, Ysabel, with Christine (#3) needed spinal surgery for scoliosis. This was extremely serious, requiring her to travel across the country and spend over a week in intensive care afterwards.
Not only did Kody refuse to go—even for a few days—he actually proposed sending Ysabel alone. Christine (#3) and the adult kids rallied around Ysabel and were with her during the surgery, but the footage of her weeping, coming out of anesthesia and begging for her daddy, was absolutely gut-wrenching. Christine (#3) couldn’t take it anymore—the years of slowly dawning revelation that her husband didn’t love her had been painful, but realizing that he had allowed his distaste for her to pollute his relationship with the kids was beyond her tolerance.
Christine (#3) left him, with an astonishing amount of grace and class, doing everything she could to promote stability for the kids who are still kids and not pressuring her adult children to ally with her. She supports her adult kids who are still close to their dad and Robyn (#4), even to the point of facilitating Zoom calls so that Robyn (#4) could “attend” when her first biological grandchild was born.
The Truth Comes Out
Seasons 16 and 17 have been about the divorce and the fallout. Finally, finally, finally, Kody has admitted the truth. He is now explicitly telling his other wives that they must be like Robyn, who he describes as “fundamentally loyal to me,” and that they must “embrace patriarchy” if they want a good relationship with him.
The Other Kids
Kody’s treatment of his not-from-Robyn children grows more abusive with each episode. What made me decide to write about this was last night’s episode, wherein COVID reaches his house with Robyn (#4). One of the kids quarantined in the basement and managed not to get it, but he, Robyn (#4), and the other four children all got it.
He described sobbing over how much he missed her, after being apart from her for ten days. In the very same episode, one of his adult sons with Janelle (#2) broke down sobbing when relating his father calling him on his birthday but only to ask questions about COVID (from which the boy had previously recovered). This is a son that Kody was apart from for most of twenty months due to COVID insanity.
The difference? Robyn’s kids are submissive and obedient and flatter Kody’s ego.
Janelle (#2) and Christine (#3) did an astonishing job raising their kids, particularly considering they had to overcome Kody’s influence. The boy took responsibility for “testing” his dad and admitted that it was a little childish not to remind his father that it was his birthday—that he just wanted to see if his dad remembered.
This same son tried so hard to reconcile with his father during COVID, and conducted a master class in emotional responsibility. This isn’t verbatim, but it’s close:
Kody: dramatically, arms flailing, snarls at the boy about his mother. “She screwed me! She screwed you too!”
(referring to her refusing to enforce Kody’s COVID rules in her house).
Son: calmly, with total self-possession. “I was vulnerable with you. I revealed my emotions. You can reveal yours too, without anger. I understand your emotion is anger but I need to be able to talk to you right now.”
I had to use a lot of willpower not to write the son a fan letter asking him for adulthood lessons. (I did write to his mothers, Janelle (#2) and Christine (#3) suggesting they write a book on parenting.)
WTF is Wrong with Kody?
Fans, including a clinical psychologist and a father who is a brilliant commentator on relationships, have diagnosed Kody as narcissitic, which I think is probably true. He is an ideal father when the children are young enough to worship him. When they’re old enough to challenge him, develop their own views, and otherwise no longer serve as reliable sources of narcissistic supply, he’s just done with them.
Christine is on Cameo
I absolutely adore Christine, and have purchased several Cameo messages from her, seeking advice. (Cameo is a service where you can buy an individual video message from a celebrity.) She’s a wonderful mother and her Cameos are a joy. If you’ve ever wanted advice from a strong, loving woman who’s learned a lot from her life path, you could do a lot worse than asking her.
What It All Means To Me
I have listened to many of the early episodes of Dan Savage’s podcast—back before he went Woke, figuring out what side of his bread has the butter—and he used to say something about polyamory. “I have been to many, many polyamory commitment scenarios. I have never been to a polyamory three-year anniversary party.”
The constant drumbeat, back when I was dating, about the necessity of polyamory once made me doubt myself. It was so steady and so clearly a baseline norm. Announcing one wanted monogamy, and wanted it enough that it was a deal-breaker, was akin to announcing a bizarre deal-breaker, something like not allowing the color blue to be worn in one’s presence. It was so fully normalized that anyone who objected to it was taken to owe an explanation for this oddness.
Besides the fun of watching the show, caring about the characters, and what I’ve learned from their mistakes, it has served to affirm for me that my desire for monogamy is not something for which I owe an explanation or apology.
With the focus of so many children, polyamory worked for this family for a long time, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the family started coming apart based on the first wife’s empty nest situation. The minute that the children were no longer the “glue” holding all the wives in, a domino fell over. The dominoes continue to fall.
Sharing an intimate partner seems to me to be exactly like Communism—it works on paper, and the people who defend it insist that the correct, true version of such has just never been tried.
November 2023 Update
Season 18 affirmed that Kody is a raging case of narcissistic personality disorder. This man has referred to his physique in glowingly positive terms several times, including describing himself as having “great 6-pack abs.” Here are some screencaps from last night’s episode:
I also believe that this season confirmed Robyn as a covert narcissist — tune in to Josh’s content if you don’t know what that is.
Meri and Janelle both left him during this season, and his response to this has been to, first, claim that he never loved them at all—which, if true, makes him an unapologetic sociopath, as the first few seasons are full of him seeming to love his first three wives very much. Not in the white-hot way of a brand new romance, but in the familiar way of longterm marriages. He’s either lying now or he was a sociopath-level liar during the first two seasons. Once he realized how terrible this claim makes him look, he backtracked into agreeing with the common fan take in the main part of this post — that he was never “in love” with any of them. Rather than taking responsibility for his failure to be honest, Kody blames them for not reacting better.
I can’t speak for all fans, of course, but I would not despise the man if he had sat his OG3 wives down and said, “I married you all when I was very young, and I honestly thought I was in love with you, but I was wrong. I found my soulmate in Robyn, and I want to be monogamous with Robyn now. I am truly and deeply sorry. It was never my intention to defraud any of you. I want to talk about how we can part amicably, remain civil, and be good co-parents.” If he had done this, I would not look at him and see a pathetic, ego-driven jackass. I would see a man whose religion caused him to make serious mistakes when he was very young and who was trying to assume responsibility for correcting them now.
But he didn’t. He continued to pretend that he didn’t have a favorite wife and favorite kids, to gaslight and make excuses, to demand loyalty of his wives that was in no way reciprocated.
When Kody got COVID, his fever never got as high as 100 degrees. He never required hospitalization or supplemental oxygen. In short, he had what most healthy people had—an illness somewhere between a severe cold and a mild flu. Being a narcissist who cannot conceive of the world continuing to orbit without him, he describes this as a “death like experience” and called Janelle, on vacation, to demand that she fly home in order to go to the store for him. (Yes, seriously.)
Kody has also convinced himself that Janelle and Christine are good friends today based solely on him, and that all they do is talk about him. This is almost as delusional as his assessment of his physical attractiveness. He seemingly has zero understanding that because they raised their kids together, with only sporadic input from him, they have a deep bond—because they were essentially an old-fashioned traditional marriage sort of team. Christine, the stay-at-home mom, fulfilled a traditionally female role. Janelle, who always worked full-time, often long hours, fulfilled a traditionally male role. Janelle was a wage-earning father while Christine ran the home, in other words, and to judge by how well their kids have turned out, this was a success. To judge by social media and podcast interviews (of which I’ve seen/heard just about all of them), their married children have chosen well — all monogamous, by the way. They have careers, many of them have master’s degrees, and they are raising their children with respect for their grandparents but a determination to avoid the mistakes they see having been made in their own childhoods.
There have been hints of covert narcissism in Robyn all along. Janelle commented in the first few seasons about how Robyn “runs (her) relationship” — the damsel in distress who needs Kody to save her regularly. Perhaps the most telling incident is when Kody announced Robyn’s pregnancy with her first child with Kody (fourth child overall; Kody adopted her first three).
The announcement was made at a family gathering that happened not long after the thirteen original kids had been uprooted from their schools and friends and taken to Las Vegas to escape possible prosecution in Utah. The teenagers had deep roots, lives, activities that could have led to scholarships (several were talented athletes), etc., and seriously struggled with this sudden move.
This was also very early in the run of the show, before it was a big hit, so while the family financial situation was improving, it was still pretty shaky. These kids had grown up with food insecurity, at least at times, hand-me-down clothes, and very slim Christmases.
When the freshly-traumatized teenagers didn’t jump for joy at the news of another mouth to feed, Robyn took this deeply personally, and her resentment towards the teenagers continued even after her son was born and the kids all came around to loving and doting on the boy. She continues to mention it, though the son in question is now twelve years old.
When Meri and Kody had their final break-up conversation, Robyn was present. Not only did she make the end of a 32-year-relationship between Kody and Meri about her, she reacted the way a little girl might to her parents’ divorce. She demanded reassurance that Meri would still be her friend, including a very plaintive and childlike, “You promise?!?!?!?!?”
The other wives, especially Janelle, have picked up on the dynamic between Kody and Robyn being that of Robyn as a kind of wounded dove who needs Kody to swoop in and defend her. I’m not saying there’s no place for that sort of thing in a marriage. Everyone needs defending and protecting sometimes, I think, both men and women. But if this is the primary dynamic—if it’s the baseline, the default setting, the foundation—something is wrong. In the case of Kody and Robyn, it’s not just the case, it’s explicit. Kody freely admitted that in last night’s episode:
Kody: “Okay. So let’s go to this point. Personally, I feel like, as we have seen, they’re trying to blame Robyn. Um, the kids are estranged and, um, Janelle has even been going ‘Oh, Robyn is this broken dove that Kody has to protect’. From all of the assholes. Yes. I feel like they have all been absolute assholes to her. And, what’s weird is, they’re assholes to me and I just put up with it. For some reason, it’s water off a duck’s back. But I did not want them separating me and her from each other. So where I go, she’s going to go.”
The grandiose narcissist protecting the covert narcissist from his own (stable, to all appearances, functional, healthy) children.
As this piece of the transcript implies, he is estranged from nearly all of his thirteen children from Meri, Janelle, and Christine, and has explicitly made his children accepting Robyn a condition of having a relationship with him.
I am a hardcore supporter of the institution of marriage, but I think this is a serious error — and almost certainly one based on the Kody/Robyn joint narcissism dynamic. Now, God knows I am not the person to ask about healthy parent-child relationships, so I might have this badly wrong (I look forward to reading the comments). But I think that a parent should never have a condition for love, and if a parent sets a condition for a relationship, it should be only in the most extreme circumstances, probably related to physical safety. In other words, I think conditions like “You cannot be on drugs in my presence” or “until you’ve been off drugs for a year, we will only meet on neutral grounds; you are not welcome in my home” or “you are only welcome in my home if you are unarmed and alone; neither your gun nor your crazy ex-con boyfriend are welcome” are all ok.
“If you want a relationship with me, you must convince me that you love and accept your stepmother and that you don’t blame her for the implosion of your family, even though I now freely admit my relationship with her caused it” strikes me as abusive and sick. Maybe sharing holidays isn’t on the table, but there are over 355 non-holiday days a year during which parent-child relationships could be nurtured.
This show continues to fascinate me for all the reasons previously mentioned. Mostly, though? I love this trashy show and I wanted to finally explain why.
If anyone read this far (ha ha), thank you!
About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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Polygamy/polyamory just seem like a nightmare to me. Having that kind of emotionally intimate relationship with just one person is difficult enough. Trying to juggle it with one or more other only seems possible with a level of detachment that would make the whole thing moot.
And I can’t imagine trying to be a father to so many children. Though it sounds like Kody just isn’t being one.
This is a reality show, right? I've never watched any t.v. reality shows, and honestly, I was pretty surprised when you first mentioned your enthusiasm about Sister Wives. Glad you decided to explain what there is about it that keeps you engaged and fascinated.
Regarding Kody, I think he represents what most men, who are relatively "normal", want in their love interest or mate, and that's RESPECT, coupled with a fair amount of submissiveness from the woman. Humans simply haven't evolved far enough for this to no longer be part of what men need (and women, too) in a relationship with a woman.
Most of you will probably hate me for saying this, but I believe wide use of the birth control pill, starting in the 60's, felled the main pillar that was holding up positive male/female relationships and marriage in general. I know it certainly affected my relationships. That and First Wave Feminism, which of course, I totally signed on to. Promoting women and men as equals in terms of their psychology and innate characteristics has caused a butt-load of problems for the institution of marriage. I used to believe that monogamy was out-dated and even harmful to marriage. After 3 divorces, I finally wised up. Sighhhhh, some people (like me) are just slow learners.
I don't believe in the idea of a soul-mate. I really wouldn't be surprised if Kody and the 4th wife don't end up divorced.