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It can be safe to say that many people across the world thought that country singer Carly Pearce was happily married when she and her husband, country singer Michael Ray, exchanged vows in 2019. However, she announced their divorce the following year in August of 2020, which took many fans by surprise.

Pearce has since been very open about the situation, and in a new interview, she said that she knew almost immediately that her marriage was doomed to fail. She was recently on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast when she revealed the red flags in her relationship with Michael Ray.

Pearce said, “I didn’t love him. There was lust and attraction there. But, it wasn’t love. When you get married, you think it’s going to be love, but I thought he was so cute. I’d 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 hot and heavy lust. It wasn’t love. It was just passionate.”

Pearce, a Kentucky native who has released popular songs such as Every Little Thing and Should’ve Known Better, also emphasized that she did not get married to Ray on a whim. “I got married to go the distance. When I married him, it was for the right reasons. I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life,” she told Bunnie.

Although she was willing to commit to her husband, the pair did not have a relationship that was built to last from the start. “We didn’t have real conversations and didn’t really know about each other. We were living our life that wasn’t really reality,” Pearce said.

Pearce revealed that she had a premonition on the day of her wedding that it would be her last. “I knew the night I got married that I shouldn’t have,” the 32-year-old star told Bunnie. “I felt so embarrassed that it happened. I was ashamed when I got married.”

The Grammy-nominated singer admitted that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she found some solace in the fact that she was able to recover from her divorce in privacy without outside interference. “I think the best thing that ever happened to me was COVID because it allowed me to deal with that in private. 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 heartbroken, so I was hiding from the world at that point, and I had a lot of shame around it,” Pearce said.

Pearce Announces Divorce From Husband Michael Ray

Pearce filed for divorce from Ray in 2020, eight months after they tied the knot. Although they have yet to publicly address what led to their divorce, she did once mention that she “wasn’t in a good place” while on The Talk show.

Pearce has been very upfront that it became apparent from the start that things were not working out. “It wasn’t what I signed up for. It just wasn’t the marriage that I know I deserved. I knew that very quickly. Plenty happened to where it was very clear to me that this was not this was not, this just wasn’t a marriage,” she said.

Bunnie asked Pearce about the rumors that suggest Ray was unfaithful during their time together, which the singer did not comment on directly. “I don’t know what to say about that, and I would never speak on it,” she told Bunnie. “I would never drag him like that, but at the same time, people have all their opinions, and, at first, that was so hard for me because I was like, ‘That’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true. What he’s saying isn’t true.’ But, at the end of the day, my friends who walked that with me, they know. My parents know and God knows, and that is enough. It’s enough.”

Pearce has a new album coming out, 29: Written In Stars, and is now living in a house in Franklin with her horse that she shared on her Instagram page. She noted that she is happy now, and that’s all that matters. “I think I was just shown just how much I care about me,” Pearce said. “I actually really have a lot of self-worth, and that showed me that.”