Janelle Brown peeled back the curtain on her and ex-husband Kody Brown’s relationship faults while thinking about dating on the latest episode of Sister Wives.
“I don’t think Kody and I ever really had a solid identity as a couple,” Janelle, 57, shared during the Sunday, October 11, episode of the TLC series. “He and I were always very much thinking about the family. We thought about the whole.”
Janelle — who welcomed six children with Kody, 57, during their 30-year relationship — confessed that as a couple they didn’t put themselves first.
“I didn’t spend enough time thinking about my relationship with him one-on-one,” she recalled. “It was just sort of a given. It was just going to happen. It was just going to be there.”
Looking back, Janelle said, “I realize now that maybe we should have probably taken some time for that. But ultimately at the end, I just sort of became apathetic. Like, I just didn’t care.”
Janelle married Kody in a spiritual ceremony in 1993, becoming his second wife, following his legal union with Meri Brown in 1990. Christine Brown joined the plural family in 1994, and in 2010, Robyn Brown rounded out the group. Kody later divorced Meri, 55, so he could legally marry Robyn, 48, in 2014 and adopt her three children from a prior marriage.
During their marriage, Kody and Janelle welcomed sons Logan, 32, Hunter, 29, the late Garrison and Gabriel, 25, and daughters Maddie, 30, and Savanah, 21. Their son Garrison died in March 2024 at the age of 25.
Janelle and Kody, meanwhile, had called it quits in December 2022 just shy of their 30-year anniversary, which would’ve been in January 2023. (Christine, 54, left Kody in November 2021, while Meri, 55, announced her split from him in January 2023.)
“I think the biggest thing for me started when he really started to be hard on my children,” Janelle said on Sunday’s episode when asked about the end of her relationship with Kody. “Wanting them to conform to his opinion, wanting them to act a certain way.”
Janelle remembered having a lightbulb moment around the time of the coronavirus pandemic when Kody began enforcing strict rules for his children in order to make an appearance at their mom’s respective homes.
“That’s when all of a sudden I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t know if I can do this anymore,’” Janelle confessed. “It was a burden to stay married.”
During the episode, Janelle also admitted that dating sounded like “so much work to me,” revealing, “The relationship that I had was so much work, and I just don’t want that anymore.”
Since filming wrapped, Janelle has found love again. She announced in August that she has a “wonderful” new boyfriend named Pete.
While Kody and Robyn are no longer on the show, they are still married. Christine, for her part, wed David Woolley in October 2023, and Meri has been dating since becoming a single woman.
Sister Wives airs on TLC Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.
