Sparks didn’t fly during their first (very awkward) introduction as teens in 2010, but nine years later Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin are a very happily married couple.
The pop singer and the model’s road to romance began in 2014.
Bieber had been in a well-documented on-again-off-again relationship with Selena Gomez (with more chapters still to come in that story), and they broke up, seemingly for good, in November 2014.
At that stage, Bieber, a Canadian singer and songwriter who rose to fame after his mother posted YouTube clips of him performing, had become close to the Jenner family. So when Baldwin, who began her modelling career as a teenager in 2014, also became friends with the celebrity Jenner clan, it put Bieber and Baldwin in the same social circle.
But they had met before as teens. See the video below of Baldwin’s dad, the Usual Suspects actor Stephen Baldwin, awkwardly introducing them in 2010.
On November 10, 2014, Baldwin and Bieber (and Kendall Jenner), who are both Evangelical Christians, were photographed together at a Hillsong Church in New York.
Rumours circulated that the pair were dating, which they both denied.
“I’ve known him since I was so young — since I was, like, 13 — and we’ve just been good friends over the years,” Baldwin told E! News in 2014. “We have just stayed close and there’s nothing more to it than that.”
But a year later, with it still unclear if the couple were actually an item, Baldwin posted a photo of herself wearing Bieber’s trackie pants. And in early 2016, the couple made it official through a PDA snap (though by then everyone already knew, anyway).
But then came heartbreak. In August that year, they broke up, during which time Bieber, who as a teen star was the first solo artist to have four singles enter the Top 40 before the release of a debut album, got back together with Gomez (we warned you that story wasn’t done). They broke-up (again) in March, 2018.
Then, in May, 2018, Bieber and Baldwin started talking to each other again. “We went through a long period of time when we weren’t friends,” she told The Times at the time. “We didn’t speak for quite some time and there was a lot of weirdness that went on. We’ve moved past that.”
And how. By the next month they were seen back at church and at a Miami nightclub before things got super serious, with an engagement in the Bahamas in late 2018.
Two months later, the couple secretly tied the knot in a New York City courthouse. Though they first denied they were married, it was Baldwin’s uncle, the actor Alec Baldwin, who confirmed they were hitched.
“They just went off and got married and I don’t know what the deal is,” said the Hunt For Red October star. “We text Hailey every now and then.”
Bieber, who has teased he will be releasing a new album in 2020 (he hasn’t released new material since 2015’s Purpose), and the model, had a “quiet, small ceremony” according to a People source.
According to the source, the couple didn’t want a “long engagement … as of now, they want a small ceremony with their families. They are getting married for love and don’t want a flashy wedding.”
Days afterwards, Bieber joined Baldwin in London where she was working for London Fashion Week. At one point, Bieber took his guitar to Buckingham Palace where he serenaded his new wife near the palace gates. It was a familiar spot for Bieber – he had once busked there before during his teenage years of Biebermania stardom. See the video below.
A year later, on September 30, 2019, Bieber, 25, and Baldwin, 23, got married again, but this time in front of family and friends in a religious ceremony in South Carolina.
“I just think that as Christians and as believers they understand that if you don’t have the God’s spirit working in your marriage it just makes it more and more difficult to make it work and have peace and find happiness,” said dad Stephen, the youngest of the Baldwin brothers.
“Weddings and marriage are supposed to be a holy commitment, one onto another … They’re going to have a lot of their pastor friends and their Christian friends around them this time.”
And now, the couple seem inseparable.
“I fall more in love with you every single day,” Bieber said in a tribute post to his wife in 2019. “You are the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I would be lost without you.”
