According to the Brown family on Sister Wives, the first wife in polygamy holds a place of honor among the wives. While the first wife has to watch her husband pursue and marry every other wife, she usually has the distinction of being the only wife who is legally married to the husband. Kody took even that away from his first wife Meri, divorcing her to legally marry fourth wife Robyn. While Meri has received a lot of sympathy, the more time goes on, the more some viewers are starting to lose their patience.
The member of the Brown family who gets the least sympathy is patriarch Kody. Kody is often dragged by fans for his poor behavior as a husband to each of his wives and as a father to his 18 children. Kody is also criticized for his poor planning, such as choosing to move the family to Arizona before they had anywhere to live. But each of the wives also get their share of fan criticism, and that includes Meri.
Viewers initially felt sorry for Meri as her marriage gradually fell apart and Kody began treating her worse and worse. But by season 15, some fans are beginning to feel that Meri is now responsible for much of her own misery for choosing to stay in the polygamous lifestyle that clearly isn’t giving her what she needs and with a husband who has said he isn’t interested in having any kind of relationship with her. After all the low points in Kody and Meri’s marriage, and his refusal to work on their relationship, the fact that Meri continues to stay with Kody has fans no longer feeling sorry for Meri.
The more times Meri goes down the dead-end road of trying to have a happy marriage with someone who doesn’t respect her, the more viewers lose respect for Meri. Fans couldn’t help but cringe as they watched Meri try to flirt with Kody on their 30th wedding anniversary, with Kody not only shooting her down, but trying to “subtly” hint that she should divorce him. One of the massive flaws of polygamy is the lack of motivation for a husband to work on his relationships. Kody has backup wives to keep him happy, so his marriage to Meri can fall by the wayside with little impact on him except having more free time.
Kody has had rough patches with each of his wives, but none of his other marriages have hit the rock bottom like Kody’s marriage to Meri. Many viewers have enough respect for Meri to believe that she could easily strike it out on her own. The fact that she doesn’t has caused fans to lose patience with her. Even worse, Meri actively convinces Christine to not give up on her marriage to Kody when Christine was talking about not wanting it anymore. If Meri is determined to wallow in her unhappiness and keep her Sister Wives stuck and unhappy, too, audiences are bound to keep turning on her, seeing her no longer as a victim, but as her own worst enemy.