‘Sister Wives’ Star Meri Brown Has No Plans to Stop Using Ex-Husband Kody Brown’s Last Name

Sister Wives star Meri Brown has finally put her marriage to ex-husband Kody Brown in her rearview mirror. But there’s one aspect of that relationship that she’s not willing to let go: her name. 

Meri Brown says it would be ‘weird’ to change her name 

Meri, 53, wed Kody, 55, in 1990. For years, she was his only legal wife. But in 2014, she agreed to divorce her husband so that he could marry his fourth wife, Robyn Brown, and adopt her three children from a previous marriage. Nearly a decade later, Meri and Kody ended their spiritual marriage. However, even though Meri and Kody have cut ties, she doesn’t plan to return to using her maiden name of Barber. 

“We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s like, okay, I am connected to Kody Brown by having his last name, but at the same time, that’s all anybody knows me as. That’s all I know myself as for the past 34 years,” Meri told People in a recent interview “I definitely wouldn’t ever change it back to my maiden name.”

Meri was just 19 years old when she and Kody tied the knot. She’s been known as Meri Brown for far longer than she was Meri Barber, which would make it strange to revert to her former name, she pointed out. 

“That would be weird for me. I only had [my maiden name] for 19 years,” she said. “This one I’ve had for 34, so it would be weird on that level.”

The ‘Sister Wives’ star can think of one reason she’d change her name 

For now, Meri plans to keep using Brown as her last name. But there is one situation that would make her consider changing her name. The TLC personality says she would “probably keep [her name] until I get married again and change it.”

“Hopefully, his last name also is not Brown,” she said, adding that it would be “funny to just be Meri Christmas.”

Since announcing her and Kody’s breakup in January 2023, Meri has started dating again. She was briefly in a relationship with a man named Amos. And in a post-Christmas Instagram update, she hinted she was seeing someone new. 

“It’s a Christmas miracle! #MysteryMan #LifeIsGood,” she captioned a photo of herself with a man named Brandon Stone. 

Meri recently told People that she’d turned to dating sites to make romantic connections. Though she said she’d “met a couple of people through people,” like many people she was relying on apps to find a partner. 

“[W]hen you live in a small town, and then this day and age, it seems to be the thing is the dating sites,” she said. 

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