Justin Bieber recently spoke to GQ about his latest album, Justice, aka the one that got Justin a bunch of side-eyes for sampling several speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. (even if MLK’s family is ok with it). And because GQ’s theme for their cover story was Justin Bieber’s continued redemption tour, they spoke about all the ways his life has changed and evolved from the obnoxious little brat with too much money and floppy hair, to a spiritual Jesus-loving husband with too much money and floppy hair. One big part of Justin’s personal life transformation sort of happened around the time he got married to Hailey Bieber. Justin and Hailey are still going strong after nearly two and a half years. But that’s not to say it’s been all happy Instagram selfies and romantic couples Bible studies since they said “I do.” According to Justin, things were really hard during that first year.
Justin tells GQ that he felt like shit for a long time and that some of it was due to a chaotic life, performing like a trained animal through his formative years, two unreliable parents, and being surrounded by people who wanted to see him make dollars. Some of it was due to actual illness, like a mono diagnosis and Lyme disease. But he says a lot of his life got better when he started to navigate the “emotional terrain” of his life. Of course, we know that his relationship to whatever church he’s currently into plays a bit part in his mental health. The other is the stability he gets from being married to Hailey Bieber. via GQ:
But he was always someone who was “compelled” to marry, he says. “I just felt like that was my calling. Just to get married and have babies and do that whole thing.” (On the “babies” part of that: “Not this second, but we will eventually.”) If you talk to people in his circle, almost all of them will point toward Hailey as the first piece of his redemption. “She is just a strong, consistent, stabilizing force in his life. And that was something he was missing all those years.”
As for the first year being rocky, well – it wasn’t because Hailey kept waking up every day in a frantic panic that another one of their animals had disappeared. It was Justin’s shit that he was dealing with – like the trauma of being Justin Bieber – that kept him from totally enjoying his life as a married person:
“The first year of marriage was really tough,” he says, “because there was a lot, going back to the trauma stuff. There was just lack of trust. There was all these things that you don’t want to admit to the person that you’re with, because it’s scary. You don’t want to scare them off by saying, ‘I’m scared.’ ”
He spent the first year as a husband “on eggshells,” he says, but at some point he started to actually believe. Now, with his marriage to Hailey, he says, “we’re just creating these moments for us as a couple, as a family, that we’re building these memories. And it’s beautiful that we have that to look forward to. Before, I didn’t have that to look forward to in my life. My home life was unstable. Like, my home life was not existing. I didn’t have a significant other. I didn’t have someone to love. I didn’t have someone to pour into. But now I have that.”
It sounds like Justin has learned to trust Hailey (and she can always trust him to close a car door on her face), which in turn has maybe de-escalated his douchebag tendencies. For example, Justin went from covering his neighbor’s house in eggshells to walking on them. And here is Justin modeling some fashions for GQ. I don’t know what the inspiration for this shoot was, but it definitely feels like an audition tape for a live-action remake of Ed, Edd n Eddy.
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