It was also incredibly difficult.
"I challenge any couple to have tried harder than we did," Grant says. "We tried and tried and tried. ... When you feel like you gave something your best shot and it fell apart, you kinda go, `OK. There are no guarantees.' "
The sum of many choices, she says, finally prompted her to decide to go through with the divorce.
On the afternoon of the interview, Grant says she has plans to take a bike trip with Gill on the Natchez Trace Parkway. The two have eaten together recently at a Waffle House at Gill's invitation. Last Sunday, they went to church. They've been writing a song together, Look What Love's Revealing.
But they are not secretly married, she states emphatically, answering one of the latest rumors to circulate through town about them.
he two singer-songwriters have been fast friends since they first met in 1993, when Grant accepted Gill's invitation to appear with him on a Christmas special in Tulsa, in his native Oklahoma.
"We got along like two peas in a pod and made no bones about it," she says.
As their friendship grew and deepened, however, others found bones to pick.
"A lot of disparaging things were said about my very public friendship with Vince," Grant acknowledges.
"One of the reasons that the friendship was so public was because it never occurred to me to hide it. I would hear rumors about, `You guys were seen doing this, you guys were seen doing that.' I just said, `Not true.' "
Conscientiously, they honored the constraints of their commitments, Grant says.
"I don't take lightly the responsibility of being a public person, of my faith, all those things. I know why God hates divorce, because it's painful and it's hardest on the kids and you have to kiss your history goodbye, start over.
"I never thought I would wind up here. I look at the choices all along the way that were made and think, I did the very best I could and I wound up here, now. I want to stand up and say, `It's not the way you think it was!' But it doesn't really matter."
Gill's marriage to singer-songwriter and clothing store owner Janis Gill ended in 1997. For all his willingness to appear in public at golf tournaments, at numerous benefits, at the Grand Ole Opry Gill always has been intensely private about his personal life and protective of his 17-year-old daughter, Jenny.
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