After he wed model Hailey, they both said marriage was tough. So... what did ... trends now

The tear coursing down his cheek in a solitary streak causes no unsightly blotches or bloodshot eyes, but Justin Bieber would have known the furore it would fuel.

Sure enough, after uploading two selfies of himself crying to his 292 million Instagram followers last weekend, pandemonium ensued.

Was the pop star suffering another mental health crisis? His previous battles with everything from drug and sex addiction to low self-esteem have, after all, been well documented since he found fame as a teenager.

Or was he hinting at problems in his five-year marriage to Hailey Baldwin Bieber, 27, a socialite, top model and devout Christian who has been credited not just with helping Justin recover from the excesses of fame, but with keeping his religious faith intact?

The couple have always made clear their marriage is no picnic — or, as Hailey put it in 2019, 'really effing hard' — and rumours of a split circulated online after Hailey was pictured at a pre-Oscars party without Justin in February.

Although gossip sites reported her moving out of the couple's £20 million Beverly Hills mansion and spotted her without her wedding ring, Hailey, daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and niece of actor Alec Baldwin, dismissed suggestions of a split as 'delusional' and described Justin as the 'love of my life' on his 30th birthday last month.

So far, so supportive. Yet under those Instagram pictures of her husband visibly upset, Hailey wrote Justin was 'a pretty crier', with a smiling cry emoji construed by some as mockery.

So what is the truth behind that tear? And is Justin too troubled for even his loving wife to save?

Given the goldfish bowl level of fame the singer has lived in for nearly three decades, it is perhaps inevitable his mental health has suffered.

R aised in poverty in Ontario, Canada, by his single mother, Pattie Mallette, who he said sometimes suffered depression (his largely absent father Jeremy, he added, 'has anger issues'), the singer found fame, aged 13, after his future manager Scooter Braun found videos of him in a local singing contest his mother had uploaded to YouTube.

By the time he was 16, hits such as One Time and One Less Lonely Girl made him what Justin describes as a 'manufactured' star.

Hailey's privileged upbringing, meanwhile, was a world away from Justin's. One of two sisters, Hailey was homeschooled in New York by her devoutly Christian parents — mother Kennya, 56, and father Stephen, 57, a recovering cocaine addict whose films include The Usual Suspects and Born On The Fourth Of July.

'I have serious morals that are instilled in me because of how I was raised,' Hailey has said.

She appeared nonplussed on meeting Justin for the first time in 2009 backstage during his appearance on America's Today show. He was 15, she 12. She had been given tickets to the show by her uncle Alec.

'Everybody had a crush on him,' Hailey later said. 'But for the first few years we had a weird age gap.'

Of course, despite his heartthrob status and an army of fans called 'Beliebers', Justin, who started smoking marijuana at '12 or 13', was still youthfully vulnerable. Last month, footage emerged of the then 15-year-old with Sean 'Diddy' Combs, the rapper who is facing an ongoing sex trafficking investigation.

In the video, Combs talks about spending 48 hours with the singer in search of girls.

'Right now (Justin is) having 48 hours with Diddy, him and his boy,' Combs says. 'They're having the times of their lives, like where we hanging out and what we're doing we can't really disclose. But it's definitely a 15-year-old's dream.' They are, he says, 'gonna go full buck crazy.'

As Justin's fame grew, his life unravelled, unchecked by boundaries and buffeted by the adulation of his millions of young fans. By 18, he has admitted, he had 'no skills in the real world, with millions of dollars and access to whatever

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