Carly Pearce knew her marriage was over on her wedding night.
The country singer, 36, opened up about her split from ex-husband Michael Ray during a recent episode of the “Person Who Believed In Me” podcast. “There’s a bit of Jekyll and Hyde … that I did not see until it was too late,” she said, referencing novelist Robert Louis Stevenson’s character Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who had an evil alter-ego. “He made it very clear that I made a very big mistake.”
Pearce, who tied the knot with Ray, 38, in 2019, added, “I blew up my life to get out of it. I didn’t stay because society tells you [that] you should. I didn’t stay because my faith says divorce is bad. I didn’t stay because it’s public. I was done.”
Pearce and Ray were married for eight months before she filed for divorce in June 2020. Their divorce was finalized just three months later in September 2020.
The songwriter ultimately learned “how strong” she is by having the strength to walk away from the relationship. Pearce said her experiences “gave her the album 29,” referring to how she overcame hardships and worked through the emotions that came with them.
“I need to write it out to process it,” she said, noting she wrote “six really intense songs” about the divorce, which she did not release. “I thought it was just my story, but I think what I’ve learned is, it was a lot of different people’s stories.This was not what I deserved.”
Pearce previously opened up about her relationship with Ray in August 2025, telling Bonnie XO during an episode of her “Dumb Blonde” podcast that she slid into his DMs and invited him to her party.
“Genuinely, I got married to go the distance,” she explained. “I absolutely did. When I married him, it was for the right reasons.” She noted that they didn’t “have real conversations” before tying the knot and “didn’t really know each other.”
“It wasn’t what I signed up for. It just wasn’t the marriage that I know I deserve,” she shared. “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 was not — this just wasn’t a marriage.”
Ray also got candid about their marriage not working during a 2023 episode of the “Bobby Cast” podcast. “We didn’t do counseling, we didn’t do any of that beforehand, and I think that — there was moments, that I look back now and I’m like, ‘Why didn’t I speak up on that?’ That was one of the first times I realized that her and I are opposite.”
He added, “I didn’t show up after our wedding day, because by that point in time, there was a lot of stuff that she didn’t show up for. And it was just kind of like — there was stuff that happened that day where I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m out.’”
Ray also shared that after their split, they duo went their separate ways for good. “We didn’t own anything together. We both signed pre-nups. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in three-and-a-half years. Divorce papers [were] sent to my manager’s office. I signed them. Got sent to her manager’s office, she signed them. That’s it.”
