Carly Pearce Enjoys Extra Time With Mother in Days Leading up to Marrying Michael Ray

We don't know when Carly Pearce and Michael Ray will officially tie the knot, but we do know that Pearce is enjoying extra time with her mother, Jackie Slusser, as they prepare for the wedding. An only child, Pearce and Slusser opted to do all the planning themselves, instead of using a wedding planner.

"I never have been the girl that cared about her wedding," Pearce told ABC Radio. "But now I'm finding it's very fun, and I never knew that my mom was going to love planning a wedding so much.

"But it's really fun and it's something that I think you don't get: that kind of time with your mother as an only daughter," she continued. "And we're having a really good time doing that, and it's gonna be very special and very Carly and Michael."

One unexpected bonus of the upcoming nuptials is how close Ray has gotten to his future mother-in-law, something Pearce never expected.

"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."

The couple had been dating less than a year when Ray popped the question, but he knew from their first date, at the Nashville Palace, that he wanted to spend his life with Pearce.

"We go the Palace and sit at the bar, and I was like, 'Okay, how do I do this, because she's getting the hint,'" Ray recalled. "I see this is happening, so I went to put my arm around her, and it was like at the moment when I put my arm around her chair, I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to marry her.' I knew that moment."

Photo Credit: Getty images / Jeff Kravitz