Spoilers for Sister Wives Honeymoon Special
I finally had the chance to watch the Sister Wives honeymoon special, which aired Sunday night. (Let me say before I get into this that TLC is extremely short sighted for not offering their shows on iTunes, not to mention Hulu.) Two things stuck out for me about this episode: Janelle, the analytic, thoughtful wife, finally got angry, broke down and cried, and husband Kody was extremely self-centered and egotistical for taking a full 11 day honeymoon to San Diego with his fourth wife, Robyn. The remaining three wives all got upset with this in their own way but ultimately came to terms with it, with Christine making an hilariously passive aggressive dig at Robyn.

Kody and Robyn’s goofy PDA
First we saw Kody’s trip to San Diego with Robyn cutting to footage of the rest of the family making a chaotic trip to the woods for a cookout. (Kody has 14 13 biological children from his first three wives along with 3 stepchildren from Robyn.) It was a big contrast, one made the more obvious by the goofy way that Kody was fawning all over Robyn in California. Robyn obviously loved it, and she’s as much of a doofus as Kody is. They seem perfect for each other that way, and while Robyn keeps claiming that she wants the other wives in her life as much as Kody, she’s still struggling to fit in and be more than Kody’s new piece. These two emphasized that the didn’t have sex before marriage, that God brought that together (under their belief system) and that they are now together forever.

Kody and Robyn were shown taking surfing lessons and visiting an animal reserve, where Kody marveled at all the animal species that were polygamous. When Kody and Robyn took a ride on a zip cord, he quipped “I’ve got four wives, nothing scares me but poverty”

Wives are upset that Kody took an 11 day honeymoon
Back at home, the wives had a bunch of sessions on the couch that seemed more like therapy than typical reality show event-retelling. They all discussed how their individual honeymoons were just a few days with Kody instead of a week and a half, and Meri explained that “we struggle with the fact that [Robyn] gets a bigger better wedding or bigger better honeymoon.”

Janelle gets upset, ignores Kody’s calls
The most surprising part of this episode was the fact that Janelle cried on camera for the first time. She said that it wasn’t “logical” for her to be upset at Kody for taking such a long honeymoon, but that “It’s been an up and down week for me emotionally. In a lot of ways I perceive any time he spends with her as cutting into our time. It’s the fact that he’s focused somewhere else for 11 days, and on one particular person for 11 days. That’s frustrating me.”

Janelle and Kody are “best friends”
Janelle refused to accept Kody’s calls for three days, after which she spoke to him and he smoothed things over. There was a lot of coverage of Janelle and Kody’s relationship. They each said that they’re “best friends” more than romantic lovers. Kody and Janelle have six children together. When Janelle explained her relationship with Kody, there was a revealing exchange between the first three wives:

Kody: “What happens I think on some level is that she’s never been romantically inclined, but she sees something happen romantically and goes ‘I’m missing that‘”

Janelle: “To say that that’s why I was mad, I don’t think so. I don’t think it was because the relationships are different. I think it was more just me still coming to terms with ‘where do I still fit into the picture?‘”

Kody: “You’ve never been replaced. I’m not marrying another Janelle. You will always be my best friend.”

Janelle: “We really are ultimately best friends. We talk about everything and anything, and we talk for a long time.”

Christine: “Your relationship with Kody was always something I was jealous over, because I was never valued as an intellectual. We never, we still don’t talk for hours.”

Meri: “I see how he is with each of you guys, and you wish that you had that. It’s like the grass is always greener and it’s hard to see what’s special about you.”

Christine gets through it by calling Robyn “sad”
Meri was struggling with missing Kody during his absence, but she didn’t have as hard a time with it as either Janelle or Christine. Christine seemed to cope by implying that Robyn was somehow weak for needing Kody. It’s interesting that, unlike Janelle, she didn’t blame Kody for going away for so long and focused her anger on Robyn. Isn’t this like blaming the mistress for your husband straying?

Robyn – “After we got back from the honeymoon, Christine [was] on the phone shooting tears and said ‘Tell me you needed this.’

‘I did, I really needed this.'”

Christine explained to the other women. “11 days for her is necessary and once she said that, I was like ‘Oh, that’s sad.‘”

Then Janelle stepped in, again the thoughtful peacekeeper. “Kody is very good at doing what he thinks is best for us… He tailors what he does, it’s different for everybody what they need.”

Robyn explains why she loves Kody, Kody explains how he loves so many wives
The end of this episode involved some laughingly faux deep introspection between Kody and Robyn, and I was again struck by how alike these two are. Robyn explained why she loves Kody in terms of his other wives, and Kody claimed that loving more than one wife is like loving more than one child. Do you think Robyn is subtly putting the other women down here? I do – read what she said.

Robyn – “One of the biggest things that attracted me to Kody is his love for his wives. The fact that he saw value in each one of these girls, for different reasons, for who they were, for their strengths and their weaknesses, was like, I just drooled… I love to know that he’s loving his other wives because that means he’ll love me too.”

Kody – “To me, loving more than one wife is really not far from loving more than one child… I still have as much depth, love and affection for Meri, Janelle and Christine as I ever did.”

Then the show tried to tie a frayed ribbon on it with footage of some kind of family togetherness party with a cake with candles, and a quote from Meri about how being a polygamist is like having a baby.

Meri – “This plural lifestyle we’re living is synonymous, in a way, with a woman who decides to have a baby. She knows what is ahead of her. She knows that there’s pain involved, she knows that there’s discomfort involved, but at the end of it she has this beautiful blessing..”

They’ve got one guy who has been married to three wives for twenty years with 14 kids, 3 stepkids and a newer, younger wife coming into the picture. Maybe they can justify that by saying the pain is necessary for their religion, and I believe that as long as their kids are well cared for they have the right to live however they want to. However their reality is a lot clearer to the viewing audience than it seems to be to the people going through it.

The next season of Sister Wives will start airing in March, 2011. Kody Brown is currently under investigation by local police for felony bigamy.