Sister Wives' Meri Brown Explains Why She Won't Return to Using Her Maiden Name Despite Divorce from Kody (Exclusive)

Meri Brown has left her ex-husband Kody Brown, but there’s one thing she’s keeping from their marriage: her last name.

The Sister wives the star’s maiden name is Barber. However, she took Kody’s last name after marrying him in 1990.

“We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s like, okay, I’m related to Kody Brown by his last name, but at the same time, that’s all everybody knows me for. That’s all I’ve known for the past 34 years.” , 53-year-old Meri tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I would definitely never change it back to my maiden name. That would be weird to me. I’ve only worn it for 19 years. I’ve been wearing this for 34 years, so it would be weird on that level.”

Mary Brown/Instagram, TLC

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Meri notes that she’ll “probably keep it until I get married again and change it.”

“Let’s hope his last name isn’t Brown, either,” she adds, before referring back to conversations she’s had with loved ones about the matter, saying, “We’re going with Black or White, we were thinking of all the last names that are colored.”

“It would be funny just to be Merry Christmas,” she adds, noting that she and her friends joked about her changing her last name to Davenport because it’s “very, very royal.” (Meri joked about taking the name Davenport, which was also her great-great-grandmother’s maiden name, on Sunday’s Dec. 29 episode of the TLC show.)

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Meri officially divorced Kody, 55, in 2014, and he legally married his fourth wife, Robyn Brown, so he could adopt her children from her previous marriage. Meri and Kody remained spiritually married, but endured many years of hardship, including Meri being caught by a woman pretending to be a man to hunt Meri and Kody’s lack of interest in working on the relationship. They jointly announced their separation in January 2023 after more than three decades of marriage. Meri later ended the marriage through her church for desertion.

(LR) Kody Brown and Meri Brown are pictured on ‘Good Morning America’ on September 21, 2011.

Ida Mae Astute/Disney/Getty

More than a year since her divorce (and after a brief romance in early 2024), Meri confirms that she has re-entered the dating world. And while she’s set up with potential suitors through loved ones, she also uses dating apps.

Still, he admits, “Sometimes I get tired of it, so I shut down my profile, and then I just do my own thing for a while, and then it’s like, ‘Maybe I’ll try again.'”

“[I’ll] turn my profile back on and see what happens,” she continues. “It’s a weird thing, because you never know, and there’s a lot [and] that I have to weed. It’s like, do they know who I am? At what point do I tell them who I am? Not only am I from a large family, but I’m also on a TV show, and then, who’s looking for their five minutes of fame? So there’s a lot to clear up. It’s an interesting process.”

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In search of her perfect match, she says that “it’s very important for me to have someone who matches my energy and cheers me on in everything I do.”

“I want to continue to be independent in what I do and also have a safe space to land, to have someone cheer me on and support everything I do and not be intimidated by it,” she shares. “I want someone who is very successful, very motivated and has his own goals and dreams to work towards. Very ambitious. I want someone who is ambitious.”

As for whether she’ll show her love journey on the TLC family series, Meri adds, “I think it would have to come down to [certain] relationship point before I did it, because it’s a big thing to be seen like that publicly.”

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Sister wives airs Sundays at 10pm ET on TLC.

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Source: HIS Education