“I Knew The Night I Got Married, I Shouldn’t Have” – Carly Pearce Opens Up On Why She Divorced Michael Ray After Only 8 Months Of Marriage

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Opening up about her marriage to, and ultimate divorce from, Michael Ray.

This week, Carly Pearce appeared on BunnieXO’s The Dumb Blonde Podcast this week, getting deep about various aspects of her life, notably her divorce, which she has never spoken so in-depth about before.

Bunnie asked her about how they met, which Carly admitted she was the one who “slid into” Michael’s DM’s because she thought he was cute and had heard a lot of good things about him from mutual connections.

This was very early in her career, around the time her 2017 song “Every Little Thing” went #1 and became her first commercial success, and Carly admitted that Ray’s career was very much on the up and up, and she was finally just starting to get a little bit of traction.

Carly says she thinks they were both somewhat blinded by the excitement and attention, though she was very clear that she went into it with pure intentions and was getting married “for the right reasons.” She admitted very honestly that she knew the night they got married she “shouldn’t have,” and Carly and Michael were ultimately only married for about eight months in total, from October 2019 until she filed for divorce in June of 2020:

“At the time, his career was rising, and honestly, like, he was more successful than me, and when our relationship started, it was like, ‘Oh, this is so exciting.’ I think we both got caught up in that, like, ‘Oh, everybody is so excited about this.’ Genuinely, I got married to go the distance. I absolutely did.

When I married him, it was for the right reasons. I think that, when you travel like this, and I thought I was doing the right thing by waiting to get married until I was 29. But we didn’t have real conversations, and we didn’t really know about each other.

We were kind of living this life that wasn’t really reality, looking back on it. I just think we didn’t know each other. We were just in it. We were in it. And you know, I knew the night I got married I shouldn’t have, if I’m being completely honest with you.”

During the COVID lockdowns, it gave her a chance to really recognize her mistake and deal with it, and she thinks if it wouldn’t have been for that, they would have stayed married much longer because she already felt so much shame over it:

“I think the best thing that ever happened to me was COVID, because it allowed me to deal with that… I think that I probably would have stayed in it longer if I could have avoided it, and not had to…

I was embarrassed when it happened, of course, and I had shame around that and was heartbroken. But I think if I would have had to do that in front of people, I would have prolonged that relationship.”

Ultimately, her reason for filing for divorce was pretty simple:

“It wasn’t what I signed up for. It wasn’t the marriage I know I deserved. I knew that very quickly, and I think in the first, we were only married for eight months, plenty happened to where it was very clear to me this just wasn’t a marriage.”

She never got overly explicit with specific reasons, but Carly hinted that “What He Didn’t Do” was based on their marriage struggles, and obviously as she has said before, her entire 29: Written In Stone album was about the end of that relationship:

‘What He Didn’t Do’ wasn’t just written out of thin air. The album ’29’ wasn’t written out of… it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good.”

It sounds like, to make it very simple, they just weren’t right for each other and it wasn’t meant to be. Carly has since moved on and been in several relationships since her marriage ended, as has Michael Ray. He dated Tyler Tritt, daughter of Travis Tritt, for a while, and she opened up about that drama for the first time too.

The entire episode is available on all streaming platforms now.

I think this song pretty much says it all, though…