Viewers know it. Their kids know it.

Janelle and Kody Brown know that there’s something fundamentally wrong with their marriage.

Well, yeah. That’s what years of emotional neglect and some pretty clear financial favoritism will do.

During the Us Weekly sneak peek ahead of the Sunday, December 4 episode of Sister Wives, we’re getting some painful honesty.

But it doesn’t sound like Janelle is quite ready to pull a Christine and live her best life.

Not yet, anyway. (We’ll keep our fingers crossed!)

“I’m not someone who throws the towel in on a marriage,” Janelle insists.

“But it seems almost like there is this gulf [between us] now,” she freely admits.

The key conflict seems to arise when they don’t see eye to eye. Apparently, Kody can’t handle it.

Janelle “Especially where he’s like, ‘I want this,'” Janelle explains.

She then continues: “And I’m like, ‘I can’t give you that.’”

After nearly three decades of marriage (spiritual marriage … simply meaning that their marriage lacks legal recognition from the state), this is still a big deal.

After all, we already saw Kody’s split from his second wife, Christine.

We all heard the news about a year ago, in the fall of 2021.

Kody has been scrambling to mend his connection with Janelle.

But it does not seem like he is willing to take the necessary steps to actually do that.

“I don’t think you and I know how to be real about things with each other,” Kody expresses in the sneak peek.

The two of them are ostensibly discussing their family’s plans for the holidays. But things have taken a turn.

“You gotta know it too,” Kody suggests to her.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong here,” he characterizes their marriage.

Waxing philosophical, Kody then asks: “Is this just what the human condition is?”

Janelle pipes up that she and Kody actually “had a functional marriage for a long time.”

She tells him: “You’re my best friend.”

Janelle then adds: “You’re the person I want to tell everything to.”

The fact that so many of their kids have moved out and moved on has definitely changed the dynamic.

“It’s almost like we’re on the cusp of this empty nest thing,” Janelle describes.

“And,” she opines, “it feels like we need to do a reset.”

Kody simply offers a reply of: “I don’t know.”

“I just feel like I have to do everything I can to make this work,” Janelle laments to the camera.

She confesses that “I’m not even sure it’s possible to come back from where we are.”

But Kody is feeling raw from losing Christine. He hasn’t learned any lessons from it, but he’s afraid of it happening again.

“It’s not safe enough for me to say, here, ‘Hey, honey, I’m broken-hearted because of this divorce,” Kody tells the camera. “And I need you to help me heal, please.’”

Janelle then confesses to the camera that she still has “so much affection” for him. But she’s not sure if it’s “love.”

Kody and Janelle Brown Both Know Their Marriage is DOOMED was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip .