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Carly Pearce has admitted to what many of us may have suspected about her very short marriage to country singer Michael Ray. In a new interview, Pearce said she knew in the back of her mind that the match was a mistake almost the night she married Ray.

Pearce was recently on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast and got real about her failed marriage to Ray, to whom she married in 2019. The divorced Grammy-nominated singer revealed that she knew something was “off” from the beginning. “It was a lusty relationship from the get-go, and I knew that. I knew the night I got married that I shouldn’t have,” she said.

Pearce was in a relationship with Ray for about a year before she walked down the aisle with him in 2019. A year after their wedding, in 2020, she filed for divorce, with both artists releasing statements confirming the split. The Kentucky-born singer-songwriter, who has been signed to Big Machine since 2016, is best known for her 2017 hit song Every Little Thing as well as Should’ve Known Better.

At the time of the marriage, the singer said she thought that Ray was “the cutest” and that “everybody told me he was the nicest guy in the world”. “I invited him to my No. 1 party for Every Little Thing. Looking back on it, it was a hot and heavy lust,” Pearce said. “It wasn’t love. It was just passionate.”

Pearce added that she had every intention of making her relationship with Ray work and did not get married on a whim or because she did not know what else to do. “I got married to go the distance. When I married him, it was for the right reasons,” she said.

However, the two did not have the “real” conversations needed to build a life together, she said, adding that their marriage was a “bubble”. “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,” the singer added.

Pearce Shares Her Divorce Was Bad, but COVID-19 Was “the Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me”

It has been a couple of years since the couple divorced, and in a recent interview, Pearce got emotional as she shared what she learned from the process. She also claimed that COVID-19 was “the best thing that ever happened” to her.

The pandemic provided the singer privacy to deal with the relationship breakdown without having to go through it in the public eye, as she had feared. “I think the best thing that ever happened to me was COVID because it allowed me to deal with that in private,” Pearce said. “I probably would have stayed in it longer if I could have avoided it and not had to. … I was embarrassed when it happened … and I had shame around that and was heartbroken.”

Pearce has yet to share specifics as to what went wrong during her marriage to Ray. In a previous interview, she had only stated that the relationship did not work out.

“I knew that. I knew the night I got married that I shouldn’t have,” she said of the relationship, adding, “It was a lusty relationship from the get-go and I knew that.”

While in the interview, Pearce confirmed that the two “didn’t have any real conversation and didn’t have a clue about each other” before they tied the knot.

Pearce Filed for Divorce in 2020, About Eight Months After Their Wedding

In January 2020, less than a year after their wedding in September 2019, Pearce and Ray announced that they were ending their marriage and that the split was amicable.

Pearce broke her silence in the news shortly after the divorce announcement by reiterating how sorry she was for the news and assuring the public that the split was amicable and that they remained friends.

Pearce Had Said Previously That Their Relationship “Started to Fizzle.”

Pearce had not shared much with the media about what she learned from her failed marriage to Ray, but in the interview, she said that it had not been what she had signed up for.

“It wasn’t what I signed up for. It wasn’t the marriage that I knew I deserved. I knew that very quickly. Plenty happened to where it was very clear to me this was not, this just wasn’t a marriage,” she stated.

Pearce Briefly Addressed Rumors of Ray Cheating on Her

Pearce and Bunnie briefly discussed Ray’s cheating during their relationship during the interview. Bunnie told Pearce that she had her suspicions and had heard about the cheating. Pearce did not confirm or deny those allegations. She only said that Ray had been unfaithful to her many times. In response, Bunnie asked if she had forgiven him, and Pearce did not answer that question.

Pearce, who says that she was in a vulnerable position at the time of her divorce and was walking on eggshells to avoid another heartbreak. She now says the split has made her the “proudest she has ever been”.

Pearce had previously said, in the 2020 interview, that her marriage to Ray helped her to finally recognize her self-worth. “This whole situation has made me the proudest I have ever been of myself. I love myself so much,” she shared, “because I finally see how much I love me and how much I love my kids and how happy we are.”