Justin Bieber says his marriage to wife Hailey Bieber wasn’t a cure-all for his mental health issues.
The “Ghost” singer, 28, who legally married the model in 2018 and celebrated their nuptials with a wedding celebration the following year, spoke to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden this week, per People, about his misconceptions about what the role of husband meant.
Calling his marriage “a journey,” he shared, “I remember when I first got married, I hit a little bit of an emotional breakdown because I thought marriage was going to fix all my problems and it didn’t.”
Calling himself a “hypocrite,” he added, “You want your wife to do something that you’re not doing and it’s like, it’s hard sometimes to look in the mirror and really have to realize, man, maybe you’re not the person that you necessarily thought that you were. And that’s just a result of trauma and life circumstances.”
Bieber has spoken out about struggling with emotional issues before. During the early days of his rekindled romance with his now-wife, the paparazzi captured photos of Bieber crying in public with Hailey at his side. In response to a paparazzo asking about his tears, Bieber held up Tim Keller’s self-help book The Meaning of Marriage and declared, “You got good days and bad days — it’s not real if you don’t have any bad days.”
In a 2019 interview with GQ, he shared that the first year of his marriage was “really tough.”
“There was just a lack of trust,” he explained. “There was all these things that you don’t want to admit to the person that you’re with, because it’s scary.”
In a 2019 Instagram post responding to fans asking him for his next album, he wrote that he was “unhappy” on his Purpose tour and that he doesn’t “deserve” that, nor do his fans. The situation encouraged him to take time for his personal life.
“I have been looking, seeking, trial and error as most of us do,” he said. “I am now very focused on repairing some of the deep rooted issues that I have as most of us have, so that I don’t fall apart, so that I can sustain my marriage and be the father I want to be. Music is very important to me but nothing comes before my family and my health.”
In November, Bieber opened up to the In Good Faith with Chelsea & Judah Smith podcast about how he is now in a better place.
“I realized there was some serious healing I needed to go through in order to get to a place where I could be in a healthy, serious relationship because I had a lot of trauma and scars,” he said. “So I just committed to working on those things and getting healthy, and, luckily, Hailey accepted me as I was.”
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