Country music artists Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires are ending their marriage.
Isbell, aged 45, filed for divorce from Shires, aged 41, on December 15, just two months before what would have been their 11th wedding anniversary, as per court records seen by PEOPLE.
The duo, who have an eight-year-old daughter named Mercy together, have been a significant musical duo since they got married in February 2013. Shires contributes by playing fiddle and singing backup vocals for Isbell’s band, the 400 Unit, while Isbell plays guitar for Shires’ country supergroup, The Highwomen.
Even though they shared their 10-year anniversary on social media in February 2023 (“Every day I wake up and fall in love with you again,” Isbell wrote on Instagram), the couple has been honest about the problems in their marriage, especially after Isbell’s album Reunions came out in 2020.
Their marriage issues were shown in the 2023 documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed. There’s a touching scene where Shires reads an email she sent to Isbell about considering marriage counseling.
“In 2022, I told PEOPLE, ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re a quasi-famous person like Jason or me, everybody’s relationships are the same; there’s up and downs and there’s good and bad and you just try to deal with it. Life’s not easy, marriage isn’t easy, but aren’t we lucky to be able to live?'”
Isbell, who has been sober since 2012, previously shared with The New York Times in 2020 about how pressures during the making of Reunions had caused him to push everyone in his life away, including his wife.
He said, “‘At one point, I said, ‘It’d be easier if somebody had cheated.’ Then we could say, ‘You did this,’ or ‘I did this,’ and ‘Somebody needs to be real sorry.’ But it was more like, ‘We don’t know each other right now. We’re not able to speak the same language.’”
In 2020, Shires moved into a hotel for 10 days because things were getting complicated, and she needed some space. But eventually, they patched things up.
She shared their rocky patch from her perspective in her 2022 song “Fault Lines.” Shires explained to Nashville Scene that during the pandemic, she and Isbell felt a disconnect, which she poured into her lyrics.
She said, “All of us have had turmoil within our respective marriages, and it was definitely coming from a place of vulnerability. In one word, that’s how I would describe how I picked every song for the record. You have the choice to be vulnerable or not. However you handle yourself, it’s all about choice.”