Justin Bieber is someone who, as he put it, always felt "compelled" to marry.
"I just felt like that was my calling," he told GQ for its May issue. "Just to get married and have babies and do that whole thing."
While the 27-year-old "Sorry" singer is holding off on fatherhood for now, he has tied the knot. Justin wed Hailey Bieber in a New York courthouse in 2018, and the couple exchanged vows again during 2019 wedding in South Carolina.
But newlywed life wasn't always easy. "The first year of marriage was really tough," Justin admitted, "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.'"
In fact, the Grammy winner said he spent his first year of marriage "on eggshells." Although, he suggested this has since changed.
"We're just creating these moments for us as a couple, as a family, that we're building these memories," Justin told GQ. "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."
Justin and Hailey's connection dates all the way back to 2009, when they first met in the lobby of the Today show. They would go on to form a friendship and briefly date in 2016. However, it would be another two years before they rekindled their romance in 2018.
Over the 10 years following the pair's first meeting, Justin's journey continued to play out in front of the world. While he continued to flourish in his career, he struggled in his personal life. He abused drugs and battled with his physical and mental health.
"There was a sense of still yearning for more," he told the magazine. "It was like I had all this success and it was still like: I'm still sad, and I'm still in pain. And I still have these unresolved issues. And I thought all the success was going to make everything good. And so for me, the drugs were a numbing agent to just continue to get through."
Justin turned to therapy and his faith, and Ryan Good, one of his longtime pals, called Hailey a "strong, consistent, stabilizing force in his life."
And while Hailey acknowledged in a 2019 interview with Vogue that "marriage is very hard"—and that the public scrutiny didn't make it any easier—she and Justin are fully committed to one another.
"I'm not going to sit here and lie and say it's all a magical fantasy," the 24-year-old model told the magazine at the time. "It's always going to be hard. It's a choice. You don't feel it every single day. You don't wake up every day saying, ‘I'm absolutely so in love and you are perfect.' That's not what being married is. But there's something beautiful about it anyway—about wanting to fight for something, commit to building with someone. We're really young, and that's a scary aspect. We're going to change a lot. But we're committed to growing together and supporting each other in those changes. That's how I look at it. At the end of the day, too, he's my best friend. I never get sick of him."