Kacey Musgraves is now a single woman, The Daily Mail reports, as she and poet boyfriend Cole Schafer have apparently parted ways after a two-year relationship. The singer began dating Schafer about a year after her divorce from fellow country music artist Ruston Kelly was finalized.
The two have been apart for about a month, the outlet reports, and have unfollowed one another on Instagram, though they still have photos of one another on their accounts.
Not long after their romance began in June 2021, Musgraves told The New York Times they first met when they spotted one another in a packed restaurant. “He did not know who I was, which I loved,” Musgraves said. By Musgraves’ birthday that August, Schafer took to Instagram to pay tribute to his new girlfriend: “Here’s to you looking to your right when you stepped into F***,” he wrote in the post, which included a photo of them in bed together. “Here’s to you writing me back. Here’s to your jawline that chaps my lips and your hair I can’t keep my hands out of. Here’s to your aesthetic and your art being a close second to your heart.”
Musgraves was equally as effusive when she paid tribute to him for his birthday this past January. She wrote of “the laughs and adventures, deep talks, ego checks, wise advice, forehead kisses, the books you recommend, your late night ‘oh I just whipped this up’ and somehow it’s extremely gourmet pasta (like, actually Michelin star) situations, the gorgeous way you observe the world and the words that follow. And mostly your unabashed, full-throttle vulnerability which is easily the sexiest thing about you.”
Throughout their relationship—as is par for the course when one partner is a singer-songwriter and the other is a poet—the two took to social media and used ample words to describe their affection for one another. Last year, Schafer called Musgraves “the most naturally gifted human I’ve been around” after Musgraves sold out Madison Square Garden. “I’ve read about artists vomiting in dimly lit bathroom stalls prior to pulling themselves on stage,” he wrote. “And, while I think there is something strangely romantic about this kind of torture, Kace just sort of floats around backstage like a butterfly that can’t make up its mind where it wants to land. She’ll jump on her hover board. She’ll send me something funny she finds on Instagram. She’ll eat a good dinner. She’ll get onto her dog, Pepper, for raising hell. She’ll laugh her a** off with Mo and Gio as they make art of her make-up and hair. She’ll do her vocal warm-ups, sometimes. Then, come 9:25 p.m., she’ll down a shot of tequila to kill whatever butterflies are flapping in her stomach, she’ll check her teeth for spinach and then she’ll walk up the stairs and disappear behind a black veil, where there is silence for a breath or two and then, a deafening roar.”
The last time Musgraves was going through a split publicly, when she split from Kelly, she vulnerably opened up to Rolling Stone the year after her divorce about how it “just simply didn’t work out” with him. “It’s nothing more than that,” she said. “It’s two people who love each other so much, but for so many reasons, it just didn’t work. I mean, seasons change. Our season changed.”
She added, introspectively, “I think I live best by myself. I think it’s okay to realize that.”
Pretty sure it was Carrie Fisher who said “Take your broken heart. Make it into art.” Wishing everyone peace.
