Justin Bieber confesses to what made his first year of marriage to Hailey Bieber “really tough” in his new May 2021 GQ cover story.

The two privately got married in a New York courthouse in 2018, and said “I do” at their South Carolina wedding a year later. He told GQ that he felt that getting married and having babies “was my calling,” although the famous couple will be holding off on the latter for a little while longer.

But with the former, the pop star’s team sees his wife as a “strong, consistent, stabilizing force in his life,” according to one of his oldest friends Ryan Good, that he had been missing all along. Regardless of that stability, the 27-year-old singer still felt like he was walking on “eggshells” for the first year of being a husband.

“The first year of marriage was really tough because there was a lot, going back to the trauma stuff,” he said. “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.’”

Similarly, the 24-year-old high-profile model reflected on their “very difficult” first year as a married couple in her April 2021 Elle cover story. She cited social media harassment as a critical factor, which resulted in her indefinitely turning off public comments on her Instagram.

“In the beginning of our marriage, I just wanted to hide. I was like, ‘I don’t want people so in my business. I feel like everybody’s up my a–.’ I was like, ‘Can there be no anonymity? Can I have any of it back?’” she recalled. “I remember someone telling me that [turning off the public comments] really lowers your engagement. And I was like, ‘I could give a f— about engagement! People are terrorizing me. Engagement, enschagement. I don’t care!’”

But in Bieber’s latest interview, he described how finally letting himself believe in having somebody to love him allowed him to have the home life he never had. As a Canadian teenage global sensation, he was hiding his passport so he wouldn’t be able to travel and perform, and he was constantly on the move before the pandemic finally allowed the pop star to pause.

“We’re just creating these moments for us as a couple — as a family — that we’re building these memories. And it’s beautiful that we have that to look forward to,” Bieber continued. “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.”