Why 2018 Was the Year Justin Bieber Truly Got Serious About His Future

Having effectively entered adulthood at the tender age of 14 when the baby-faced YouTube phenom signed his first record deal (that first studio album would go on to be certified triple platinum), Justin Bieber always assumed he'd be on an accelerated track. 

After all by 15 he'd already "had a couple of girlfriends," as he put it to Chicago's B96-FM, and at 18 he was so serious about one of them—you may recall his romance with Selena Gomez?—that he was sharing a home with her doing "a marriage kind of thing," as he told Complex and getting his first real taste of the daily ins and outs of committing yourself to one partner.

So when he declared around that time to WWD that "By 25 or 26, I want to see myself, like, married or start looking for a family," it pretty much checked out. As he explained to the outlet in that 2011 interview, "I want to be able to have done what I wanted to do—to be successful, to do a movie or whatever. But if the time is right, I definitely want to be married by 25." 

Though, this past spring, with his 25th birthday less than a year away, consider us among the skeptics who doubted he'd hit that particular milestone. His revived romance with Gomez seemed to have fizzled for what easily felt like the umpteenth time and his sole romantic prospect was 22-year-old model Baskin Champion who he'd gone cold on after a couple months of hanging out, with a source telling E! News, "He has a lot coming up and is working on new music, and isn't focused on dating right now."

And while he had a collection of career highs already firmly in his pocket (12 American Music Awards, a $99 million grossing 3D concert film and a Grammy for a track off his most recent album, 2015's Purpose) and he had come out of his self-imposed hiatus for a surprise performance at Coachella in April, even his professional momentum had ground to a halt since his decision to call a premature end to his 2017 Purpose World Tour with just 14 shows left on the docket.