Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage (7 page)

At the time, Meri and I were living in a cabin with a giant living room and two small, unpleasant bedrooms. Meri went to bed, leaving me and Janelle sitting on the junky furniture I’d picked up at a yard sale.

Janelle was forthcoming. “I think I belong in your family,” she said.

I was flattered and pleased, not to mention relieved. Months
earlier I had told Meri about my interest in a relationship with Janelle—but it was more of an impromptu suggestion than a serious proposal. So it felt proper that Janelle should make the official opening move. In many ways, it’s more appropriate. After all, I was a married man. I should not be making moves on women. That would defile my relationship with Meri.

Quite often in our faith, it’s the woman who approaches the family she is interested in. I think people are surprised by how often the woman makes the opening move. If a woman finds a family to which she feels spiritually connected, typically she builds a relationship with the first wife or wives, then she will tell her father, who then speaks to the father of the husband in the family. Now, Janelle didn’t exactly play by the rules, but since my father had been involved in trying to find her a husband, it seemed appropriate enough.

Ever since Meri and I got engaged, we had affirmed our commitment to the principle of plural marriage. There are many couples who are polygamous in belief, but live monogamously—in other words, while they believe the principle, they don’t live the principle and never take other wives into their families. Meri and I did not want to be one of those couples. We both felt that we’d been called to open our family to additional wives. We’d been married for three years and had three wonderful years of monogamy.

If Meri had misgivings about Janelle, she didn’t voice them to me. She seemed happy enough to welcome Janelle into our home. Back then, we were still very young and didn’t have the wisdom or the vocabulary to talk about our deepest emotions. So if something was troubling her, I fear she would have been unable to express it in a way I understood.

Meri and I moved back to Wyoming to get ready to bring Janelle into our family. We had to find a house that was big enough for all of us. Janelle and I were officially courting, but
things were moving quickly. For various reasons, courtships for second and third wives are traditionally quite short. The most important of these is that it’s neither appropriate for a married man to be spending excessive time with a woman who is not his wife, nor is it fair to the other wives to sit at home during a long courtship.

Even in comparison to most plural courtships, Janelle’s and mine was particularly short. We managed to go on only one date. And it wasn’t much of a date. It took place sometime after New Year’s and it was freezing cold. I had been working a fifteen-hour shift, so when I finally got off work, it was late. The town where Meri and I were living in Wyoming was really small. By the time I picked Janelle up, all the restaurants were closed. So we drove around in the dark. Janelle’s mother had given me a ring that had been hers. I put the ring on Janelle’s finger and asked her to marry me. It was more of a formality than an actual proposal. It was dark, it was late, and it was cold.

Two weeks later we got married. We had a spiritual ceremony on another bitterly cold January night. Then we went on our honeymoon. We had no plan. We just drove and drove, staying wherever we felt like stopping.

Except for that brief car ride during which Kody proposed, until our honeymoon, the only time we’d been alone was when we went out to retrieve something from the cow pen on the ranch. Although I was looking forward to finally having the freedom to be alone together, it was awkward at first.

Our courtship had been chaste. We’d only shared one kiss
and it was a very innocent one—when a man is married it’s extremely inappropriate to have any physical intimacy during a courtship.

During the first few days of our honeymoon, it was difficult for me to consider our relationship as a married couple. Even though we’d had the spiritual ceremony, which committed us to each other in a newer, deeper way, I felt no closer to Kody than I had a week earlier. We had been friends, but now we had to learn to be husband and wife.

I know now that Kody and I weren’t in love then. But there wasn’t a moment that I didn’t believe I’d made the right decision, not just about Kody, but about my new faith.

When I announced my intention to convert from LDS to fundamentalism, I was challenged by many members of my family. They believed I was not just making a mistake but committing a sin. Nevertheless, I never once wavered in my decision to accept the beliefs of my new religion. In marrying Kody, I alienated my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandmother. My sister, too, initially rebuffed me. Although it was hard for me to come to terms with my estrangement from certain members of my family, I imagined that I’d have sister wives who would, at least in part, compensate for that loss.

I’m sure all of this was on my mind during my honeymoon. So I felt pressure for my marriage to succeed right from the start. However, I had no idea how to go about this. Kody and I had a deep friendship and we were completely compatible on an intellectual level. We were committed to the decision we’d made. Now we had to find a way to make it work.

By the end of the honeymoon, we had arrived at a point where we felt safer with each other. But it would be many, many years into our marriage before our true love story would begin.

I didn’t know when I married Kody what a struggle that first
year would be. I moved into the house with him and Meri and lived in their guest room. I felt like a long-term visitor, an eternal houseguest instead of a wife.

Meri and Kody were still very much in love and they had no idea how to incorporate me into their lives. I had no idea where I fit into the marriage. When we watched movies they would sit on the couch and hold hands under a blanket and I’d sit in my own chair.

I didn’t feel as if I had my own place in the house. Arguments would erupt over the smallest things—the right way to fold clothes, the right way to clean the kitchen. I felt challenged and confronted on all fronts. I lost my sense of self. I would have to learn to speak up for myself and establish my own life and status within our household.

It wasn’t until Kody married for the third time that things would begin to settle down in our household.

I was raised in a polygamous family just outside of Salt Lake. My grandfather was the head of our church, which means my family has been closely involved with all aspects of our faith since I can remember. You could say that when it comes to our church, I’m connected.

Although I was raised polygamous, it wasn’t until I was seventeen that I decided, without a doubt, that I was going to accept the principle of plural marriage. It took me a while to come to this decision. I reflected and prayed and turned inward until I had my answer. Eventually, I developed a strong testimony about the way I wanted to live my life.

The biggest influence on my decision to live the principle of plural marriage was my grandmother. She loved having sister wives and knew that the strongest relationship in her marriage was with them. When I decided that I was going to enter into a plural marriage, I knew that it would be only as a third wife. Even as a teenager, I was certain this was the path for me.

I understand how many people might think this is a strange preference. Why would I want to come third when I could come first? But when you think about it, if you are as committed to
plural marriage from a young age as I was, you’re less interested in the monogamous stage of the relationship than in the plural stage. I wanted sister wives as much as I wanted a husband.

It’s a common misconception—at least in my worldview—that it’s best to enter a family as first wife. People often think, incorrectly, that the first wife has the highest status and the most security. I never saw it this way. In fact, in my opinion, being the first wife takes too much work and involves too much self-sacrifice. You have to give up your life entirely and be joined at the hip to your husband. It’s just you and your husband until the day he marries a second wife. This kind of single-minded devotion never appealed to me—I’m independent and I like my freedom.

Being the second wife didn’t seem like a better option either. In fact, I think that would have been worse than being the first wife. The second wife has the hardest job and is put in the most uncomfortable position, because she’s the one who comes along and disrupts the marriage of the first wife and her husband. You can’t blame her—it’s not the second wife’s fault. It’s just the nature of her role. She’s the wedge that comes between the couple. And I was never going to put myself in that position. No matter how fair and understanding a first wife is, there’s no way to avoid the emotional struggles and heartache when a second wife joins the family.

But the third wife—she’s the lucky one! She’s the one who comes along and makes peace between the first two wives. The third wife is in a blessed position. She doesn’t have to face marriage on her own without the help from sister wives or bear the burden of breaking up a previously monogamous couple. I was going to be a third wife all the way!

Around my nineteenth birthday, my sister Wendy went on a survival trek with our church. The leaders of her group were a newlywed couple, Meri and Kody Brown. When Wendy returned
from her adventure, all she could talk about was Kody. Kody, Kody, Kody! She was full of stories about how strong and athletic Kody was. “Kody pulled us all up a hill!” she said. “He threw us over a wall one by one!”

Wendy explained that Kody and Meri were new to our group, which is why I’d never heard of them before. (As it turned out, Meri had been a member for years—she’d even been over to my house on several occasions, but no one had noticed her until she married Kody.)

The next day, I went to church with Wendy. The hall was crowded. I was checking out the crowd when my eyes landed on a handsome young man. Without my sister telling me, I knew he was Kody. I thought, Wow, Wendy forgot to mention how cute Kody is. He’s really, really cute!

I have to admit that I don’t remember seeing Christine in church that morning. I had been in the church for only six months, so the group was fairly new to me. There were different faces at church each week, which made it difficult for me to remember everyone I met.

A week after I returned from the survival trek, our church held a dance. Of course, I attended with my new wife, Meri. (Although I’d met Janelle once or twice, we were only casual acquaintances at this point.) But there was one girl who caught my eye—Christine. She was wearing a turquoise dress with a lace ruffle at the collar. She was bubbly and sweet and as cute as anyone I’d ever seen before. She was also overflowing with positivity. Her liveliness and good cheer were infectious. However, I
was still a newlywed and new to the polygamous faith. Although I thought Christine was really cute, I wasn’t yet ready to consider a second wife.

I didn’t know this, but Christine had a crush on another boy that night. She was just nineteen and she was a romantic. But there was an undeniable spark between us. When I looked at her, I had a feeling—call it a sixth sense—that our destinies were interlaced.

Meri and I didn’t have any newlywed friends. And since we didn’t have any children and Meri wasn’t pregnant, we spent most of our time with single people our age. We always had a group at our house eating ice cream and hanging out. Christine had a big circle of friends, and she always seemed to be in our midst. And since Christine’s family was so involved in our church, they regularly hosted gatherings to which Meri and I were usually invited.

While I had an inkling that perhaps something important was starting to develop with Christine—I was awed with how adorable and upbeat she was—Meri and I weren’t yet looking to add to our family. We were newlyweds and still very much a couple in love. This made it difficult for me to hang out with my buddies, because it would mean leaving her alone. Eventually, Christine and Meri became friends, which was great. But when I started to notice that Christine was growing interested in me, and when I started visualizing a future together, I knew that exploring this would be unfair to Meri at this point. If Christine and I started hanging out alone—in essence, if we were to start courting—Meri would be abandoned by her two closest friends.

Meri had inadvertently made it clear to me on several occasions that she wasn’t prepared to court Christine. One weekend at a field day for the younger members of our faith, I was busy being my loud, boisterous self. I was running all over the field we were gathered at, hosing people down with water. Everybody
was chasing me in order to pay me back. But they couldn’t catch me. In the middle of all this, I heard Christine cry out, “Kody, my masculine man!”

I looked over at Meri and I could almost hear her growling. I hadn’t seen many examples of plural marriage since I was new to the faith, so this was the first time I experienced it close up. But I couldn’t blame her. We were very young.