Sister Wives Recap:Lonely Meri Gets Conned Into “Catfish” Affair & Is Terrified To Tell Kody

Poor Meri. When you have a polygamous family with four wives and 17 kids, it’s a no-brainer that someone WILL feel neglected. That has turned out to be first wife Meri who made the agonizing confession this week that loneliness led her into an emotional affair.

Meri Brown broke down and sobbed on the season finale of Sister Wives as she made the stunning admission that she was so lonely in her polygamous marriage , that she fell into an affair. Not a physical affair, mind you, but an emotional relationship with who she thought was a man, named “Sam Cooper”.

Now, while Meri gave her confession to the Sister Wives viewers in a long, heartrending mea culpa, she was too afraid to spill the beans to husband Kody or fellow sister wives, Janelle, Christine and Robyn. Instead, she confused them by making a rambling announcement during a family vacation dinner in Alaska, that she might just ‘go away.’

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told a baffled Kody and his other wives. “Don’t be surprised if I’m up and gone.” Meri, as it turns out,  is racked with guilt over her online liaison with “Sam” and is also freaking out that she may have hurt the family by having an illicit emotional relationship with a threatening person.

Meri was an easy target for “Sam Cooper.” With her only daughter, Mariah, away at college and the other Browns so busy with their other 16 kids, Meri felt “lonely.” “I’m just so alone so much of the time,” in her rambling house, Meri explained.

Instead of going back to school  or work, two things that Meri has talked about before on the show, she made the fatal mistake of going online looking for companionship. “I was talking to one person who really made me trust him. He just kept saying all the right things. He was being very kind and compassionate and understanding and I trusted him,” Meri explained to the viewers.

It got worse. Meri admitted that “he was making me start to feel love for who he was portraying himself to be.” He told her that he loved her, was attracted to her and she felt flattered. Despite Meri realizing early on in her relationship with “Sam”, that “he was just feeding me a line of bullshit,” “I chose to ignore it because I enjoyed just talking to somebody,” she confessed.

Ah, Meri, that’s just so sad that despite being a member of the humungous Brown clan, you felt like you had no one to talk to. Hello, where was your husband, Kody? Meri has had, she pointed out, a major case of empty nest syndrome, but under very unique circumstances.

“Usually, when people go through having an empty nest, it’s a couple doing this together, but in a plural marriage that’s not the case,” she bemoans. “I’m in this isolated, alone and lonely and I don’t feel like anyone else in the family can relate.”

She has a point. All the other wives still have numerous kids underfoot, and Kody is busy running from wife to wife and family to family each night, and Robyn is even expecting Brown baby #18. But instead of Meri giving full disclosure to the rest of the family’s adults during the episode, she just gives them the impression that she’s going through your basic mid-life crisis.

“I’ve been struggling with stuff for awhile,” she tells them during dinner, then threatens to possibly just go away. She’s not ready to tell them that she now believes she was “catfished” online and has been talking to a woman, who was pretending to be a man.

“I feel like I have been targeted and my family has been targeted,” and she’s terrified that her “catfisher,” a woman who’s now been identified as “Jackie Overton” will now hurt her family. Clueless Kody, 46,  doesn’t say a word during the dinner, out of fear, he later explains, “that she doesn’t want to be married to me, but she does want to be part of the family.”

“I’m afraid to ask her — I’m afraid she’s going to get right in my face and say, ‘This is you,'” he worries. What a mess! All of Meri’s fellow wives make it very clear that they love her and support her, and now post-finale Kody has tweeted that, “I will love and support Meri Brown ALWAYS!!! She needs to let me. Working on it! #SisterWives.”

Well Kody, so glad to hear that. We knew being a sister wife wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And Meri, 44, yes, you need to do something more with the rest of your life, besides watching all of Kody’s other wives raise their kids. Career time, Meri?

In other more heartwarming Sister Wives finale news, Madison’s boyfriend Caleb, a self-declared “one woman man” asked Kody for permission to marry her, and we learned that oldest son, Logan has no plans to be polygamous like dad. “I’m not necessarily who my parents are — don’t judge what I am,” he says, when talking about how hard it was to get any girls to date him. Polygamy is a turn off to a lot of girls, he’s learned. You’re right, Logan.

So HollywoodLifers, should lonely Meri stick with her polygamous marriage to Kody or should she leave and look for love with a monogamous man? Let me know.

— Bonnie Fuller

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