Dan + Shay’s Issues With Each Other Led to Marriage Problems
Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney, better known as the country duo Dan + Shay, are making waves on The Voice Season 25. Smyers and Mooney are the first duo set of coaches that The Voice has ever had, and they’ve come a long way through the years. They previously had a public falling out that nearly resulted in the complete deterioration of Dan + Shay — and their quarreling affected their marriages.
Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay had personal issues that led to problems in their marriages
Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay are best friends, but working together hasn’t always been easy. They released a video in 2023 titled “The Drive” that detailed their falling out in 2021.
“I was in, like, the lowest low of my entire life. Came off the road, and I was like, ‘Man, I f***ing hate music. I’m ready to quit,'” Smyers said in the video.
“I could feel the separation, and I think there were little things between you and I that we never talked about,” Mooney added.
The country music duo started working together as Dan + Shay in 2013. Despite their success in touring and at awards shows, Smyers and Mooney felt burned out and miserable, as they didn’t take the time to celebrate their many accomplishments. Not only did their burnout affect their friendship and music-making abilities, but it also affected their marriages. “It was affecting everything,” Mooney stated. “Not just our band. Like, my marriage, everything. I was in a really dark place.”
“You live life, things happen, life gets in the way, and I had no balance before,” Smyers added. “It was completely one-sided. I was ignoring my marriage; I was ignoring my friends. I completely burnt myself out — entirely burnt myself out.”
In 2024, the singers are in a fantastic place with music, each other, and their families. They came out stronger after their rough patch and continue to make country hits today.
Who are the country singers married to?
So, who are Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay married to?
Smyers married his wife, Abby Law, in 2017. According to People, the couple met in Nashville in 2013 and got engaged in Hawaii in 2016. Law is a marketing manager and a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs, as that’s where she’s originally from. The couple has four dogs and met at an animal-based rescue center.
“I think we’ve acted like [husband and wife] for the past few years, so it’ll be nice to make it official,” Smyers told People before he and Law tied the knot. “Everybody’s timeline is different, but by the time we got engaged, we were so familiar with each other that there wasn’t anything foreign or scary.”
As for Mooney, he and Hannah Billingsley have been together since 2015 and have three sons. That year, the former Miss Arkansas asked Mooney if he was ever coming to her home state. Before this, she and Mooney had been texting intermittently for years. Dan + Shay planned to be touring in her town of Fayetteville just four days later, and Mooney and Billingsley hit it off.
The couple got engaged in 2016 and had a secret Arkansas wedding that night. Billingsley didn’t know that Mooney planned a surprise wedding for her. When he heard his song, “From the Ground Up,” play on the radio after popping the question, he drove her to a stone chapel, where family and friends were waiting for the wedding to happen.
Shay Mooney said he’s ‘very different’ in the way that he approaches life than his wife
Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay fame adores his wife, Hannah. But he’s admitted that they don’t always see eye to eye. However, he loves this about her and believes that’s what makes their marriage so strong.
“Opposites attract in a lot of ways, in every kind of dynamic,” Mooney told Variety. “You look at any marriage. I’m very different in the way that I approach my life than my wife is, and I know Dan’s the same, from Abby, and that’s a beautiful thing. When you’re able to work together with someone that is very different than you, it’s a great picture of what humanity looks like, and it’s very reflective of really what our society is like, when done in a healthy way.”
The Voice Season 25 airs on Mondays and Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.
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