“I thought it was really, really, really super inappropriate at first.” That was Meri Brown, 55, talking about tantra yoga speed dating — on November 8, 2026, in the city where she was born. Hours later, she walked into the event anyway, carrying a little pouch of beads. Thirty-six years after she married the only man she had ever dated, Meri Brown is learning how to date. Here is the whole road, date by date.
April 21, 1990: “I Do” at 19 — Before She Ever Really Dated
Meri met Kody Brown in October 1989, introduced by his sister. They were engaged by Christmas and married on April 21, 1990 — she was 19, he was 21. In the church she grew up in, dating was not really dating: as she put it on Season 21, “you date with the intention of getting married.” She has been honest since about the speed of it: “I jumped into my relationship with Kody really fast.”
January 10, 2023: The Joint Post That Ended 32 Years
Meri and Kody confirmed the end of their spiritual marriage in a joint Instagram post on January 10, 2023, admitting they had spent “more than a decade” trying to fix problems that would not fix. It was the final date in how four wives became one: Christine had left in November 2021, Janelle in December 2022, and Meri — the first wife — was the last to go. She later told Christine she had stayed partly out of stubbornness, so Kody could not claim she left.
October 2023 – Early 2024: Amos, the Four-Month First Try
Meri’s first post-Kody romance was Amos Andrews, whom she began dating in October 2023 and went public with in January 2024. It lasted about four months. After 32 years of having her marriage filmed, her first attempt at dating again was short, quiet, and hers. It set the pattern for everything since: she would rather move slowly than get it wrong twice.
2025 – October 2026: Ron, and the Friend Zone Entered on Purpose
Meri met Ron at a speed-dating event in Season 20, and a year later she is still taking it slow — on purpose. “I don’t want to jump into something, like, really fast and then get my heart broken,” she said on the October 11 episode. “I jumped into my relationship with Kody really fast. I just think that moving slow can be wise.” On October 18, she told friends the two were “comfortable in the friend zone” and had become “really, really good friends.”
October 25, 2026: Proposals “on a Weekly Basis”
Here is the strangest date on the timeline. On the October 25 episode, Meri revealed she gets proposed to on a weekly basis — by strangers sliding into her messages. The woman who spent 32 years married to one man now fields marriage proposals from men she has never met, while the one man she actually knows is still in the friend zone, by mutual choice.
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The latest date is the one that explains all the others. On November 8, Meri flew to San Francisco — the city where she was born — to weigh whether it could be her future home, and to walk into a tantra yoga speed-dating night. She told her sister Rebekah she first thought the idea was “really, really, really super inappropriate.” The rules: a bead in his pouch, a touch on his chest, if she wants to know him better. She went in anyway. “I feel like I’ve spent so much of my life in the shadows,” she said. “We had to hide because of the homeschool. We had to hide because of the polygamy.” The same episode took her shopping with best friend Jenn Sullivan, where she finally named Kody’s wardrobe rules: “He liked to choose the clothes that I wore” — “really weird and very controlling.” For the first time in her life, the final say belongs to her.
Meri Brown spent 33 years in a marriage she entered at 19, then four years learning to date at all — slowly, on purpose, one bead at a time. So which date on this timeline was the real turning point: the day she married Kody, the day she left him, or the night she walked into a room full of strangers in San Francisco? Tell us which date you would circle.
