Carly Pearce, who will perform at the CMT Music Awards on Sunday, was married to fellow country singer Michael Ray for less than one year. The two got engaged in December 2018 and married in October 2019. The marriage was short-lived though, and Pearce filed for divorce in June 2020. Pearce, 32, is now dating former MLB player Riley King.
Pearce and Ray, 34, confirmed they were dating in July 2018. Weeks later, Pearce admitted to Taste of Country that she had a crush on him for a “really long time” and began commenting on all of his Instagram Story posts to get his attention. “I did what every girl does in 2018, slid into the DMs,” she said at the time. Ray admitted at first that he didn’t understand her intentions, but a light clearly went off in his head. He proposed to her on Dec. 19, 2018, during a trip to Mexico with Pearce’s family.
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The former couple tied the knot in October 2019, in front of about 100 family and friends on a Nashville-area farm. The wedding was officiated by Grand Ole Opry announcer Bill Cody. “Knowing without a shadow of a doubt that I didn’t settle for something less than truly the person that I think was made for me is something that I am thankful for,” Pearce told PEOPLE.
After eight months of marriage, Pearce filed for divorce. The couple did not have any children. They made their final public appearance as a couple on June 6, 2020, when they performed at the Grand Ole Opry without an audience. “This was a hard decision. It wasn’t something she wanted to have to do,” a source close to Pearce told PEOPLE in June 2020. “This hasn’t been a quarantine realization – it was a last resort.”
Since the divorce, Pearce has been open about how the split affected how she felt about herself. “It was awful. I mean, I’m being completely honest with you, that it was so embarrassing. It was so shameful,” she told Us Weekly in February 2021. “I felt like I had failed. I felt like … I would never find love again because I was divorced at so young, and [I] was just embarrassed.”
The two “very quickly realized we were not meant to be,” Pearce told PEOPLE in November 2020. “This was not a flippant decision,” she added. “This was something that I really took time to make sure I was doing the right thing. It was very clear that this was not the marriage that I wanted.”
In February, Pearce told Smooth Radio she was “thankful” for the divorce, which has continued to inspire her latest work. “I want to write music that maybe can be shocking at times,” the “What He Didn’t Do” singer said. “Clearly, writing about a divorce, I don’t think we had really seen that in a long time as far as just really going in for it. And so there’s just like a level of inspiration where you don’t have to try to make something, I guess, embellish something.”
“So for me, I just felt super inspired to write what was happening because it was kind of happening in real-time. So what I meant by that is I wish that I could have something so blatant in my life every single time I’m writing a record just to make it the thing,” Pearce continued. “Because there was no shortage of song ideas and writing during that process, because I knew exactly what I was going through if that makes sense. And it felt like there was a lot to say.”
Pearce scored CMT Music Award nominations this year – Video of the Year for “What He Didn’t do” and CMT Performance of the Year for performing “One Way Ticket” with LeAnn Rimes and Ashley McBryde for the CMT Crossroads: LeAnn Rimes & Friends special. Earlier this year, she won the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” with McBryde.
