Christine ‘Chose to Be Weaker’ in Kody Relationship

• Christine Brown says she “chose to be weaker” early in her marriage to Kody. 
• She says she was the “constant” for the children and got “overwhelmed” putting everyone else first.
• “The cost is me,” Christine says in an exclusive clip from Sunday’s “Sister Wives” tell-all episode.

The “Sister Wives” star Christine Brown shares just how long she’s been struggling to find her identity in her marriage to Kody in an exclusive clip from part two of the “Sister Wives One on One” tell-all special, airing Sunday on TLC. 

“I chose to be weaker. I just did,” she says of the Brown family dynamic back when Kody lived with Christine, who is his third wife, and his first and second wives, Meri and Janelle, respectively, in one house in Utah. 

Christine, who announced her split from Kody in November, was the primary caregiver of most of the children Kody shared with all three wives at that time because Janelle worked outside the home. Christine said on past episodes of “Sister Wives” that she allowed Kody and Janelle to make most of the decisions for the family and went along with them without feeling like her opinion mattered much.

This isn’t the first time Christine opened up about feeling like a “basement wife.” She previously referenced it and explained the meaning of the term in a March episode of “Sister Wives,” according to People, saying that in “the plural community, there is certainly a ‘basement wife’ mentality.”

“If you have a situation where there’s a wife that’s a queen bee, well, the other wife goes in the basement, and she doesn’t matter as much. And I’ve seen it enough. I’ve seen it a lot,” she said last year.

Christine, who’s the biological mom of six of Kody’s children, tells the host Sukanya Krishnan in the clip that she wasn’t aware of the term “basement wife” at the time it was happening to her but that the situation affected her personal identity. She often let the other Brown adults dictate her role to make life “easier,” she says, adding: “But then in the end, I lose myself.” 

“The cost is me,” Christine adds. “I put everybody first most of the time.” 

Christine says she tried to be whomever Kody needed her to be at any given time: “It’s like, I can be the peacemaker here. What do you need? What does Janelle need? What does Meri need? What do all the kids need?” 

She tells Krishnan that the dynamic left her “running on empty” and she even asked Kody for help, confessing to her husband at one point that she “can’t do this anymore.” 

Christine says that when she told him how she felt, Kody called her out for changing the “agreements” the Brown adults had that she would be the “constant” for the kids but she felt “overwhelmed.”

When Krishnan talks to Kody’s second wife, Janelle, about Christine’s feelings in the same preview of Sunday’s tell-all episode, Janelle says she didn’t know what her sister wife was feeling at the time because Christine “never said anything” about it to Janelle. 

Janelle says she doesn’t want to discount Christine’s experience but adds, “I feel like she’s coloring that experience with her perspective now.”