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

12/30/2024 10:00 AM

"It would be funny to just be Meri Christmas," the TLC star tells PEOPLE

Meri Brown has moved on from her ex-husband Kody Brown, but there's one thing she is holding on to from their marriage: her surname.

The Sister Wives star's maiden name is Barber. However, she took on Kody's last name upon marrying him in 1990.

"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, 53, tells PEOPLE exclusively. "I definitely wouldn't ever change it back to my maiden name. That would be weird for me. I only had that for 19 years. This one I've had for 34, so it would be weird on that level."

Related: Sister Wives' Meri Is 'Very Comfortable' with Ex Kody but They're 'Not Friends': 'Not That Kind of Relationship' (Exclusive)

Meri notes that she will "probably keep it until I get married again and change it."

"Hopefully, his last name also is not Brown," she adds before referencing conversations she's had with loved ones on the matter, saying, "We go with Black or White, we were thinking of all the last names that are colors."

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

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Meri officially divorced Kody, 55, in 2014 and he went on to legally wed his fourth wife, Robyn Brown so that he could adopt her children from her previous marriage. Meri and Kody remained spiritually married, but they endured many years of hardship, including Meri being catfished by a woman pretending to be a man and Kody's disinterest in working on the relationship. They jointly announced their separation in January 2023 after more than three decades of marriage. Meri later got the marriage terminated through her church on the grounds of abandonment.

Over a year since her divorce (and following a brief romance in early 2024), Meri confirms she has reentered the dating world. And while she has been set up with potential suitors through loved ones, she is also using dating apps.

Yet, she admits, "Sometimes I get tired of it, and I turn my profile off, and then I just do my own thing for a while, and then it's like, 'Maybe I'll try it 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 of this [and] that I have to weed out. It's like, do they know who I am? At what point do I tell them who I am? Not only that I am from a plural family but also on a TV show, and then, who is looking for their five minutes of fame? So, there's a lot that you have to weed through. It's an interesting process." 

Related: Sister Wives' Meri Brown Gives Rare Update on Child Leon as They've 'Made a Decision to Not Be Super Public' (Exclusive)

In looking for her perfect match, she says it's "very important to me to have somebody who matches my energy and cheers me on with all the things that I'm doing."

"I want to continue being independent in what I'm doing and also have a safe space to land, that somebody is going to cheer me on and be supportive of everything that I'm doing and not intimidated by that," she shares. "I want somebody who's very successful, and very driven, and has his own goals and dreams that he's working on. Very ambitious. I want somebody who's ambitious."

As for whether she would show her romance journey on her family's TLC series, Meri adds: "I think it would have to get to a [certain] point of relationship before I did that, because that's a big thing to be seen publicly like that."

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Sister Wives airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.