Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber: When a first love comes back

Selena Gomez UNICEF 2, 2012 · Joella Marano
CC BY-SA 2.0 · Cropped for display; adapted photo under the same license.

One bike ride, and an old love was a public question again. On November 1, 2017, Vogue reported Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber cycling together in Los Angeles. Teen Vogue noted the excitement among fans, while pointing out that neither had formally commented on their relationship status.

If you have ever seen someone again after a breakup, you may know that hurry. You tell a friend you had coffee. She asks whether you are back together. You are still thinking about how it felt to sit across from him.

At eighteen, she wanted to stop hiding

In her May 2011 Seventeen interview, Gomez was asked why she had become more open about Bieber. She wanted some things to stay private, but she also wanted to be eighteen: to fall in love, spend time with people and find out who she was.

Bieber spoke about being seen with her, too. In an October 2012 Oprah interview, reported by ABC News that November, he said he could talk to Gomez about anything. With photographers around, he didn't want to separate from her and leave her feeling he was ashamed to be with her. ABC's account appeared after reports of a split; the interview had been recorded earlier.

If you remember the first time someone took your hand where other people could see, you may remember the relief of it. You could enjoy being his girlfriend without having to pretend you were only friends. In those early accounts, both Gomez and Bieber described wanting room to be together in public.

The breakup didn't put everything neatly away

By June 2013, the words and the relationship label were already different things. ABC's later chronology records Gomez telling Good Morning America that she would continue to care for Bieber and defend him against unkindness. It also reports that her representative had said they weren't officially dating.

If a relationship has ended, you may still dislike hearing someone speak cruelly about him. You know the man they are reducing to the breakup story. Defending a good thing about him can feel, to everyone else, like announcing you want him back.

Gomez's public statement of care was there years before the 2017 photographs. It did not, by itself, settle whether they were a couple.

Looking back, they each described how close it had been

In V's Spring 2015 interview with James Franco, Gomez remembered the pleasure of having someone beside her at events, and the scrutiny that made it feel as though they only had each other.

I was 18 years old, and it was my first love.

Selena Gomez, V, Spring 2015

She was guarding more of her life by then. She also said she would not take the experience back.

In his 2015 Complex interview, Bieber recalled living together at eighteen and making the relationship too much of his identity.

These were separate recollections. His description belongs to him; it doesn't tell us how Gomez would have described their home or their arguments.

If you once arranged your whole week around a relationship, you may recognise how much is left behind when it ends. It can take time to remember what you like doing on a Saturday without checking whether he is free. Missing him and liking that Saturday to yourself can happen in the same week.

Why did Selena Gomez let Justin Bieber back into her life in 2017?

The bike ride put them beside each other again. It couldn't tell anyone what they had said in private. In her profile published on November 30, Billboard's Brooke Mazurek asked Gomez directly what had brought Bieber back into her life.

Gomez began with being twenty-five, rather than eighteen, nineteen or twenty. She valued people who had affected her life. Maybe, she said, an earlier attempt could have meant forcing something that wasn't right. Then she added:

But that doesn’t mean caring for someone ever goes away.

Selena Gomez, Billboard, November 30, 2017

Her answer widened to longtime peers, including Demi Lovato and the Jonas brothers. She was speaking about the people she had grown up with, too. Her answer held affection for people who mattered, with uncertainty about the earlier relationship still in the sentence.

In 2011, Gomez wanted to be able to go out with Bieber openly. In 2013, she could say she cared while her representative said they weren't officially dating. By 2017, letting him into her life again did not require her to declare that everything before had been right.

If an old love comes back, perhaps the hardest part is feeling you must defend the entire past before you can have one afternoon in the present. Gomez's answer left the past less tidy than that. Someone had mattered. Maybe trying to be together before had meant forcing something. She could say both.

The years between belong to you, too. If seeing him again brings a question you couldn't ask before, there is room to say what you want now. You can sit across from someone who knew you then, with a life you have lived since.