Hailey Bieber (née Baldwin) recently reflected on her decision to marry pop singer Justin Bieber when she was very young, just 21 years old.
“I was married when I was 21, two months before I turned 22, which is insanely young,” she said in Elle’s cover story, published Thursday, adding that it “sounds almost ridiculous when you say it out loud.”
She continued, “Although I do think for somebody like me and somebody like Justin, it’s different. We’ve seen a lot for our age. We have both lived enough life to know that’s what we wanted.”
The model, now 24, briefly dated the 27-year-old singer in 2016 before they parted ways. They rekindled in 2018 and got married in a New York City courthouse months later. A year later, they had a larger wedding celebration in South Carolina.
When Justin proposed in July 2018, Hailey said the then-24-year-old singer was “at a stage of his life where he could make decisions like, ‘I’m done with girls, and I’m done with fooling around, and I’m done with partying.'”
Even before they reconnected and knew they wanted to be together, Hailey said they independently wanted to get married at a young age.
“We were friends first for a really long time before there was anything romantic. But we always knew that we were aligned on what we wanted in our future. We had talked about wanting to be married young and having a family young and building a life. Even before we knew we wanted to be with each other,” she said.
According to Hailey, her desire to settle down early is a result of her parents’ story. She said that Stephen Baldwin and Kennya Baldwin met on a bus in New York City when they were 19, fell in love, and got married four years later.
“When I was young and I would hear the story of how they met, it sounded like the most romantic thing in the world. You fantasize about having the same thing. I do think it influenced me to want to be married young,” she said.
The reality of marriage
Hailey previously spoke about the ups-and-downs of marriage during a 2019 interview with Vogue.
“We’re two young people who are learning as we go. I’m not going to sit here and lie and say it’s all a magical fantasy. 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 marriage is,” she said.
The model added, “There’s something beautiful about it anyway—about wanting to fight for something, commit to building with someone.”
While Hailey knows that she and her husband will change with age, she said they’re “committed to growing together and supporting each other”. “That’s how I look at it. At the end of the day, too, he’s my best friend,” she said, adding, “I never get sick of him.”
