The big risk with Justin Bieber’s engagement
MARRYING your childhood friend may seem like a sweet idea from the outside, but proposing to Hailey Baldwin could spell more trouble than usual for Justin Bieber, writes Katy Hall.
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THE irrational fury of his fans aside, there is something off about the news that Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin are engaged to be married.
In part, it’s that they’ve only been dating again (the pair were romantically involved for a few months back in 2016) for a month and that they’re both incredibly young (Baldwin is just 21 while Bieber is 24). But mostly, it’s their weave that makes this holy union so questionable.
The weave, for those unfamiliar with the term, is that specific group of friends that you spend your formative years with (think high school, university, bar jobs, or as in this case, other people wealthy beyond their wildest dreams by the age of 21).
Just about everyone, Bieber and Baldwin included, has either been in or is currently in a weave.
Remember the friends you used to party with in university — the ones that appear in all of the early photos on your Facebook feed in which you’re inexplicably wearing fluorescent sunglasses in a pitch black club at 2am — and that time you awkwardly got trapped in the midst of drama because your housemate decided to make a move on your best friend’s ex who was also your friend, but it wasn’t weird because they were cool by that point? That’s your weave. Or how about when you liked your best friend’s high school boyfriend three years after they broke up and she moved on with his best friend’s older brother? Also a weave, and probably one formed within a small town at that.
Bieber and Baldwin are part of an elite Hollywood weave. Members include people like Kendall Jenner, Gigi and Bella Hadid, The Weeknd, Drake, Zayn Malik, Selena Gomez, and Taylor Swift. And thanks to social media and the fame that surrounds them, the inner workings of their weave aren’t just well known to us mere mortals but documented for eternity.
For example, Bieber spent years dating Selena Gomez on and off. Gomez later dated the Weeknd, who is also the ex-boyfriend of Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin’s best friend. During one of these crossover periods, Gomez and Hadid shared a runway at the iconic Victoria’s Secret show, an event Bieber often attends.
Around the same time of Gomez dating The Weeknd, Zayn Malik was dating Bella’s older sister Gigi Hadid and collaborating with Taylor Swift, Gomez’s good friend and mortal enemy to the Kardashians.
Later down the track, Bieber reportedly moved on to Kourtney Kardashian, Kendall Jenner’s older sister. When that fizzled out, Bieber moved on to Sofia Richie briefly, who after parting ways with Bieber went on to date Scott Disick, the father of Kourtney’s three children and Kendall’s brother-in-law.
Is the weaving of the weave making you feel seasick yet?
Weaves, as fun as they can be for a time, are insatiable vortexes that suck reasonable people into their never-ending game of Spin the Bottle. They’re like summer camp and Days of our Lives combined with social incest. And sure, those years are seminal in forming one’s own identity and figuring out whether or not you have a certified drinking problem. You may gather a collection of STIs and comedic hook-up stories that will tide you over when you’re settled and monotonous and actually care about your romantic life. But what you do not, or rather should not collect from your weave though, is a life partner.
Whether you’re astronomically famous and have a complex that no woman can ever know the real you or not, there comes a time in every person’s life where, in the interest of dating someone you or your good friends haven’t previously smooshed bits with, you go outside the group of people you’ve been around since you were 15.
But Bieber’s putting an optimist filter on it, telling his 100 million Instagram followers: “Gods [sic] timing really is literally perfect.”
And hey, maybe by getting engaged “on the Seventh Day of the seventh month” the pair will reach “spiritual perfection” and remain together forever.
Or, maybe like many other couples who never broke free of the weave’s curse, they won’t.
But as they say in the new age churches that Bieber and Baldwin frequent together, couples that pray together stay together.
Katy Hall is a writer and producer at RendezView.
Follow her on Twitter: @katyhallway