Sister Wives' Meri Brown Opens Up About Jealousy in Polygamy: 'I Thought I Was a Bad Person' (Exclusive)

Meri Brown admits jealousy affected her marriage to Kody Brown.

“Anytime that you expand your family, there's going to be a shift,” Sister Wives star Meri, 52, tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “You've got just the logistical things, but then you've also got the emotional things."

"I'm human. I'm going to get jealous. He's human. He is going to not know how to deal with a woman's jealousy," she adds.

In January, Meri confirmed her split from Kody, 54, after 32 years of marriage. Now, Meri believes she didn’t possess the maturity to navigate a plural marriage in those early years.

“When you're 20, 21, 25, 30, whatever, when this is happening, you're not grown up enough,” she says. “You think you are, but you're really not grown up enough sometimes. Or maybe it's more not that you're grown up enough, but more that you just don't have the tools in your tool belt to know how to deal with some of these issues.”

The teachings of the Mormon church complicated how Meri handled her feelings of jealousy.

“We're taught in our church structure that jealousy is a thing that you just need to deal with and you just need to hide it, and you need to be a good person,” the mom of child Leon, 28, says. “Now I understand that jealousy is okay. It actually can be used as a guide. And before, it was like, oh, it's wrong. I'm a bad person.”

Meri admits she wondered, “What's wrong with me for having these feelings?”

Kody spiritually married Janelle in 1993, Christine the following year and Robyn in 2010. (Meri and Kody legally divorced in 2014, allowing him to marry Robyn and adopt her children from a previous relationship.)

“I remember Kody would ask me, ‘If you're okay with them coming in the family, why are you jealous? Why are you having a hard time?’” Meri recalls. “Well, one, I'm human. Two, I didn't understand that it's okay to be jealous. I thought I was a bad person for having those emotions.”

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Christine left the marriage in November 2021 and Janelle confirmed in December that she did the same. Meri calls the family breaking up “really sad to me.”

“I'm really, really, really glad of the connections that I still have within the family, and I'm glad for the people who do have connections with each other,” she continues. “Just because we're one family, doesn't mean we all have to have the same relationship with everybody. I think that's a misconception a lot of times. Not everybody is going to click with everybody else. There's going to be hurts that happen along the way.”

Though hurt certainly did happen along the way, today, “life is good,” Meri says. “I'm successful in business. I've got another really exciting projects coming along. I've got good people surrounding me. I've got an awesome support system. Things are good.”

For more on Sister Wives, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

Sister Wives season 18 premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.