- calendar_today August 26, 2025
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In what feels like a lifetime ago, country singer Carly Pearce tied the knot with another country singer, Michael Ray, but she revealed in an interview that she “knew the night I got married that I shouldn’t have.”
Pearce, 32, got candid about one of the most tumultuous periods of her life, where she ended up making one of the biggest mistakes of her life. In an interview on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast, the Grammy-nominated singer claimed that from the first night that she got married, she knew that it was a mistake.
“I wanted him, and I knew what I was getting into. It was more lust than anything,” Pearce confessed. “He was a crush that I got. I had met him, and I thought he was so cute. I heard he’s 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. It wasn’t love. It was just passionate.”
Carly Pearce Reveals Michael Ray’s Marriage Didn’t Last Long
The “Every Little Thing” singer had an eight-month marriage to Michael Ray back in 2019, and the divorce between the two also felt like a total whirlwind for the country star. Reflecting, the Kentucky native opened up about the marriage she had been so excited for, claiming that she thought she was doing the right thing at the time.
“I thought I was making the best decision ever,” she recalled. “I got married to go the distance. When I married him, it was for the right reasons.”
Pearce continued to state that she “didn’t have enough reasons not to” marry Ray, but ultimately ended up finding out early on that it was “not the marriage that [she] knew [she] deserved.” She then added that after the two got married, they “didn’t have real conversations” and that she didn’t “really know him.
We knew each other, but we didn’t really know about each other. We were kind of living this life that wasn’t really reality.
Pearce knew the night she got married that she shouldn’t have
The divorced singer continued to share her early takeaways on her short-lived marriage, revealing that she knew right from the start that the union was a mistake.
“It’s funny because I knew the night I got married that I shouldn’t have, and it was because of the way that I felt,” Pearce said. “But to your point about people not knowing, I will never stop loving him. I will never stop caring for him. I will never stop supporting him. But I knew we were making the mistake.”
Pearce then went on to talk about how the start of the COVID-19 pandemic almost felt like a blessing in disguise, as it gave her “privacy” to deal with her divorce as opposed to a public one.
“I probably would have stayed in it longer if I could have avoided it and not had to. … I was embarrassed when it happened. It was my first marriage, and I had shame around that and was heartbroken,” the Grammy-winning singer said. “I think the best thing that ever happened to me was COVID because it allowed me to deal with that in private. It didn’t have to be a public divorce.”
The “I Hope You’re Happy Now” singer filed for divorce in 2020, just eight months after getting married to Ray, and has since remained mum on what actually went wrong during the time they were together.
