Ever since they were first spotted together in 2009, rumors have swirled about Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin's relationship. The couple finally made their feelings for each other clear in the autumn of 2018 when they legally tied the knot in a surprise civil ceremony, but their official wedding ceremony didn't actually take place until September 30, 2019.
Justin and Hailey are finally opening up about what took them so long to get married, and their shocking revelations prove just how chaotic their lives and relationship have been over the past decade. Throughout Hailey's first year as a wife, she forced to balance planning their wedding with trying to help out with the health issues that were threatening Justin's life.
Justin And Hailey Actually Have A Complicated, Decade-Long History
Justin and Hailey first met back in 2009, when Hailey's uncle Alec Baldwin gave her tickets to Justin's appearance on TODAY.
Aftery they met backstage, Hailey's father, Stephen Baldwin, and Justin’s mother, Pattie Mallette, developed a friendship that connected their kids. Rumors began to circulate that Hailey was one of Justin's biggest fans, but Hailey refuted that claim to Vogue in her 2019 cover interview, saying, "I was never a superfan, of him or of anyone."
“It was never that crazed, screaming thing. I didn’t think about it in any kind of way except for the fact that he was cute. Everybody had a crush on him."
Their Age Gap Delayed The Start Of Their Relationship
Despite Hailey's initial crush, she and Justin didn't date at first due to the "weird age gap" between them. It wasn't until years later, after reconnecting while attending services at the same church at Irving Plaza, that their bond grew stronger.
"Over time he became my best guy friend. I was running around with him as his homie, but we weren’t hanging out."
They finally started dating in 2016, but they didn't consider their relationship exclusive. Things ended poorly between them, due to issues Hailey thinks they "still need to talk about and work through."
“Fizzled would not be the right word—it was more like a very dramatic excommunication. There was a period where if I walked into a room, he would walk out," she told Vogue.
Justin's Declining Health Postponed Their Wedding Ceremony
In June 2018, Hailey and Justin ran into each other at a conference in Miami hosted by Rich Wilkerson Jr., the Vous Church pastor who officiated Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's wedding. They decided they were finally over the drama, and by the end of the conference, Justin told Hailey that they were "not going to be friends" because he hoped for more.
Within a month, Justin proposed with an enormous oval-shaped diamond ring, and they got married in a civil ceremony just a few months later. The couple then started making plans for a more elaborate wedding ceremony which could include their friends and family, but those plans were quickly pushed aside as Justin's health deteriorated.
Justin has since been diagnosed with Lyme disease, but at the time, the couple couldn't figure out why he was so sick.
“When we first got married, we were just figuring out our life together. I felt like putting a wedding in the middle of all that would be really hectic and stressful," Hailey explained to Elle.
The public’s perception of Justin weighed heavily on the newly-married couple, and the popstar's fans were quick to cast blame on Hailey for his poor health.
"It was hard because everybody from the outside was being super mean and judgmental, saying he looked like he was on drugs, saying how unhealthy he looked, when in truth, he was not healthy and we didn’t know why,” she added. “It was months of me being a new wife trying to help him figure out what was wrong and what was going on."
Hailey Helped Justin Recover And Give Up His Addictions
Once Hailey finally figured out the source of Justin's health troubles, she made sure her husband stopped using drugs and received nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide IV treatment to help flush toxins out of his body. She also added an oxygen chamber to their house to help with his anxiety.
"For people who used to have a drug problem, when they get sober, the pleasure centers of their brain don't work the same. So what NAD does is actually helps to repair that part of that brain and it helps repair the pleasure centers to balance them back out," Hailey explained on Justin's YouTube Premium documentary Justin Bieber: Seasons.
Justin admitted to doing "pretty heavy drugs at 19" on Instagram, and added that "there is an insane responsibility and pressure put on a child who's brain, emotions, frontal lobe (decision making) aren't developed yet." Hailey has been very supportive of her husband's attempts to get over his addiction, and while she has a strict no tolerance policy towards them, says that she understands why he started using drugs in the first place.
"I think when you take somebody very, very young and they get horrible, crazy crippling anxiety and it goes undiagnosed and you don't know what it is you are feeling, you start to self-medicate because it makes you feel better. Just helping not to feel anything."
The couple finally celebrated their marriage on September 30, 2019 at the 20,000-acre Montage Pametto bluff luxury waterfront resort in South Carolina. While it took months for Justin to update fans on his relationship status after his and Hailey's 2018 civil ceremony, he immediately shared his happiness on Instagram after their official ceremony with a post which proclaimed he's "looking forward to forever" with his wife.