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Country singer Carly Pearce has revealed that the “night I got married I knew that I shouldn’t have.”

Pearce recently appeared on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast to discuss the early days of her brief marriage to country singer and musician Michael Ray.

Pearce and Ray got married in 2019 but split up eight months later. In the interview with Bunnie XO, Pearce talked about the details surrounding their split, saying that their marriage was never really a “relationship” built on love.

“You can date and do things like that, but this is not a relationship,” the Grammy Award-winning singer said.

“I didn’t marry him without thinking, no,” Pearce continued. “I married him to go the distance. When I married him, it was for the right reasons.”

Pearce also said, however, that Ray and she “didn’t have real conversations and really know about each other. We were living a fantasy and living this life that was like just so crazy, that it wasn’t really reality.”

Pearce and Bunnie XO also briefly talked about rumors that Ray cheated on Pearce during their marriage, with the singer saying that those rumors “started to pile up a little bit.”

Pearce said of her marriage that it “wasn’t what I signed up for…It just wasn’t the marriage I knew that I deserved.”

The singer confirmed on the podcast that during her wedding night, she was already having second thoughts. “I knew the night I got married that I shouldn’t have. It was one of those things that, as time went by, I started to feel that…’This is not me. This is not right, and I do not deserve this,” she said.

Pearce would file for divorce from Ray in the summer of 2020, less than eight months after getting married.

The singer told Bunnie XO that after her marriage ended, she felt ashamed. “I was embarrassed when it happened,” she said. “It was so embarrassing, and I was so sad. There was just a lot of shame around that for me. I just broke my heart when I decided to end that.”

Reflecting on the split, Pearce would say: “If I ever saw him, if he ever watched this, thank you. Because you have really taught me so much more about myself. You taught me how strong I am.”

Pearce says Ray taught her to value herself more. “I just think I was really shown just how much I cared about myself,” the country singer added.

Carly Pearce: Back to Love and Single Again

Pearce and Ray’s marriage lasted less than a year before Pearce filed for divorce in 2020. While the reasons for the split are unknown, she revealed in a recent interview that she knew early on that the marriage was a mistake.

Pearce has moved on and says she is in a “happy season of life.” The “Every Little Thing” singer, in another recent podcast interview with Nashville’s Dave Miranda on Miranda’s Miranda’s Right podcast, was asked if she ever finds herself thinking about getting married again.

Pearce was quick to answer the question, “Totally. I’m single. I will be back in love again and looking to get married in the future, hopefully. I have always known this to be true.”