Remember when we would spend hours each day trying to decipher the latest Meri Brown meme or message?
The Sister Wives star seemingly spent months and months hinting at problems in her marriage via mysterious quotes on Instagram.
Now, however? On Season 16 of her long-running reality show?
Meri has stopped hinting. She's started just coming right out and saying.
On the January 9 episode of Sister Wives, Meri and Robyn will sit down and engage in a heartfelt conversation about their relationship with husband Kody.
It's a tad bit ironic, of course, because Meri divorced Meri back in 2014 so that he could marry Robyn and legally adopt her kids from a previous romance.
In a scene filmed about 13 months ago, meanwhile, Robyn actually complains about spending too much time with Kody amid the COVID-19 pandemic because she's the only spouse following his strict protocols.
“I did not sign up to be in this family to only have Kody in my life,” an emotional Robyn tells Meri in a clip released by Us Weekly.
“As much as I love Kody and it is great to have him around, it is stressing me out.
"I’m worried about the kids that aren’t seeing their dad, and I’m worried about the wives that aren’t seeing Kody.”
Meri, for her part, absolutely cannot relate to anything to Robyn is saying here.
“At least you’re part of the Brown family. Do you know how hard it feels to be … I am an outsider, Robyn,” Meri admits, explaining in a subsequent confessionall that she no longer has any connection to Kody whatsoever.
"No I don’t feel like I am part of the Brown family. It’s this weird thing.
"Am I sister wife when I don’t have a husband? And I have a husband, technically, but do I? … It’s weird."
It's sad, too. Very sad.
When Robyn tells Meri that she’s hopeful Kody and Meri can get back on the same page, Meri replies on Sunday's installment:
“He told me that we can be friends, and that’s all.”
This marks the second time this season that Meri acknowledges she and Kody are just friends.
She says that, but she also admits that she maintains hope for something more... despite getting no indication from Kody that he wants anything more.
"It's lonely," Meri stressed during a prervious conversation with the TLC camera. "Like, I live alone. I just miss my family."
And yet:
As she has emphasized over and over again, Meri has no plans to follow Christine's lead and walk away.
We really have no idea why.
"Kody has said some things to me more recently that leads me to believe that, you know, there's no repairing our relationship," Meri said earlier this season, adding:
"There are days that I get very, very discouraged, but then there's days that I have so much hope.
"If I quit, if I walk away, then it's not gonna get better.
"I'm not going anywhere, y'all, you're stuck with me. Whether you like it or not!"