Why Bunnie Xo “Abandoned” Jelly Roll
Though Bunnie decided she was ‘gon ride with Jelly Roll all the way to his Tennessee home, leaving Las Vegas was tough.
Homesick and struggling with “full-time mom-ing” given her rough relationship with her own stepmom, “I was daydreaming and romanticizing about my old life back in Vegas,” Bunnie acknowledged. “My life had been flipped upside down in a matter of months—and it was chock-full of responsibility and monotony—the two things I had managed to avoid completely since I left home at fourteen. Cracks were forming in our marriage.”
Among the chasms: Girls from Jelly Roll’s past who, said Bunnie, “decided to make my life miserable as the new girl in town.”
Arguing with Jelly Roll more than ever, Bunnie woke up a few days after Bailee’s tonsil surgery and packed her bags. “Today I know that to my core, I’ll never abandon my family,” stressed Bunnie. “But that day, I did. I could make up a million excuses for why I left, but it just boils down to fear. I was scared out of my damn mind.”
John Shearer/Getty Images for CMAHow Jelly Roll’s Affair During Bunnie Xo Marriage Began
It didn’t take long for Bunnie to regret her decision and soon she was renting a huge five-bedroom Sin City home for them all to share. “It was my way of apologizing for abandoning Bailee and him,” she explained. “It was my way of saying I’m in this for good now. Actions, not words.”
But soon it was Jelly Roll having second thoughts. “All of a sudden J decided to pull the plug,” Bunnie detailed. “I never saw it coming.”
Just five months into their new Las Vegas life, Jelly Roll announced he and Bailee would be moving back to Nashville. “When I asked him why, he gave me every excuse except for the real one: He was talking to his ex behind my back,” Bunnie shared. “Not a baby mama, but this young girl he was seeing briefly before he and I hooked up. I’d felt it but couldn’t prove it. But I’d also felt his pain. The wounds that were deep inside him, left to fester, unhealed, and I could see how neither of us had really learned how to love.”
Though she felt his offer for her to join them in Tennessee was half-hearted, she accepted, explaining, “I wasn’t going to abandon our little family ever again.”
Matt Baron/BEI/ShutterstockWhy Bunnie Xo and Jelly Roll Weren’t Initially Monogamous
“I thought my openness and willingness to have third parties would save me from all the other cheating I’d experienced in my life,” Bunnie shared of inviting other women into their bed. Theirs wasn’t an open relationship, she stressed, “But if a girl wanted to come home with us, we more than likely wouldn’t turn her down.”
And should Bunnie want to hop into another man’s bed, “J has always told me that I can sleep with other men if I want to,” wrote Bunnie. Though at first she felt hurt “like he didn’t really love me if he wasn’t possessive and jealous,” she eventually began to see his side.
“We both live by the motto that we aren’t each other’s possessions,” she noted, “and consider our relationship to be free, not open.”
