Carly Pearce Is Grateful for the Bond Michael Ray Has With Her Mother

Carly Pearce has always been close to her mother, Jackie Slusser, and now her future husband, Michael Ray, is as well. Pearce, an only child, credits her mother with convincing Pearce to pursue her musical aspirations when she was just a child. Now as an adult, there are so many things about her mother that she admires, revealing that Ray shares in her affection.

“I think something that I really love that I didn’t know he even knew – my mom and I are really, really close,” Pearce told PopCulture.com. “She quit her job as a cosmetologist to help me when I was 10 years old do all this. She moved to Dollywood with me, and she brought me to Nashville and all those things.

“He involved her so much in the proposal without me even knowing, and has just understood my bond with her and really let us do the wedding, too,” she continued. “He loves my mom the way I always want everybody to love my mom, and they have a bond outside of me that I think is really special. It just means a lot to me that he does that.”

Pearce and Ray were on vacation with her parents in Tulum, Mexico, when Ray popped the question, with Slusser helping Ray with all of the details.

“I asked her mom and dad whenever we went down to her family’s house in Alabama,” Ray recalled on SiriusXM’s The Highway. “Carly runs 4000 miles a day like a gazelle, and so I knew I had an hour to myself with her mom and dad, so I took it and asked her mom and dad. It went into immediately with her mom, I could not have done the proposal without her mom, at all.

“She helped me out completely,” Ray continued. “I wanted that because her and her mom are very close, and I knew that between her mom and I, we would really be able to make this exactly what she wants.”

Pearce and Ray have yet to publicly announce their wedding date, but Pearce does reveal that all the plans are pretty much completed.

“Wedding stuff is coming along,” Pearce said. “We’re pretty much done with wedding planning. My mom and I are doing it by ourselves. No wedding planner. It’s just going to be really small and intimate, just about our closest family and friends.”

Photo Credit: Getty images/ Jason Davis