They say you can fall in love in a million different ways for a million different reasons.

They say you never fall in love with two people quite the same way.

And it’s true. I have fallen in love quickly and intensely, then slowly and with reservations. I’ve experienced teenage love and fallen in love with someone who barely even knew I was there.

But this is the first time I’ve fallen in love with someone I once hated.

I have fallen completely in love with Justin Bieber and I don’t even feel the need to keep it under raps.

Guilty pleasures be damned; I don’t feel vaguely guilty about this one.

Guys, I’m not sure if you’ve been informed, but the Biebs is COOL now. He’s gone and pulled off the ultimate Justin Timberlake, transitioning from a dismissed young pop singer to a legitimate performer. Of the top 5 Songs on Apple Music he occupies 3 spots.

Once strictly the stuff of female preteen fantasies- a little blonde personification of a teenage girl’s sexual awakening- it’s now become completely acceptable for people of all ages and genders to announce their adoration for him.

My history with Justin has been a long and torrid one. Previously, my feelings for him could only properly be described as “unrelenting detest.”

IF I listened to his music (which I admittedly did, you know, to fulfill research and curiosity purposes of course), it was done alone in a dark room at a low volume, much like a teenage male sifting through the contents of redtube.com for the first time.

I had a vague awareness that he was talented as fuck. I watched that “Never Say Never” documentary (once again alone in a dark room for research purposes), so I knew his talent wasn’t manufactured.

I understood that his songs were absurdly catchy. You know the kind you find yourself still humming 20 hours after you’ve heard them and silently hate yourself for it.

Five years ago I too found the song “Baby” playing on endless loop in my mind. But I didn’t welcome it, I fought it; I despised it. I hated his angelic, captivating little voice, his baby-faced good looks and his constipated-looking selfies. That hair swoop and high-pitched prepubescent twang so adorable to some was intolerable to me.

Because here’s the thing, although his talent wasn’t manufactured, he felt manufactured. He was molded and constructed and chipped away at by his record label, the music industry and the media until he seemed like this robotic wax sculpture of a teenager.

So it didn’t matter that he had the voice of an angel riding a unicorn through a field of gumdrops; I thought he was an absolute squid. It wasn’t important that his voice was undeniably good because his interview presence was atrocious. He was an entitled kid with a chip on his shoulder and I couldn’t see through that. Talented or not I had no desire to like him.

And it’s not that I blamed him. Outside of my general dislike for Bieber, there were undertones of something else: pity.

I felt sorry for him. I can only compare my feelings for Biebs as those I felt watching the documentary Blackfish about Orcas held in captivity at SeaWorld.

We raised Bieber. We put him in the spotlight and let our daughters and sisters and some of our sons and brothers swoon over him. We let people scream and faint in his presence. We put him in a fish tank, treated him like a God and then blamed him when he started believing his own hype. We expected him to be normal and approachable despite being raised under the most abnormal of circumstances.

We expected him to never have a bad day, a bad moment. We wanted wax sculpture robot Justin, not the human. We expected him to continuously welcome five years of relentless attention. We examined his personal relationships under a microscope and reveled in these personal relationships fell apart. We prodded through the first love of a 16-year-old and called it entertainment.

Then, in October, the paparazzi took a picture of him naked, put his dick on the Internet and we called it news.

We ogled low-grade, high-range photos of a 21-year-old’s penis. But hey, he’d better not be a prick about it (no pun intended). All’s fair in love and celebrity.

We mocked him in his youth and then we started sexualizing him the minute it became legally acceptable for us to do so. There is no normalcy in that.

So no I didn’t blame him. But I was also just tired of hearing about him.

But then, just when I had resigned myself to a lifetime of loathing the Biebs, came the Comedy Roast. The single best PR move I have witnessed this year, nay, this DECADE. And just like that, with one line:

“What do you get when you give a teenager two hundred million dollars? A bunch of has-beens calling you a lesbian for two hours”

…and Justin Bieber became likeable again.

He was funny and humble. A perfect mix of badass and emotional. His apology seemed sincere rather than contrived. In one fell swoop, Comedy Central and a panel of offside comedians made Justin Bieber human.

And in the span of two hours I went from hating him to walking around like the human version of the heart-eyed emoji, loudly declaring his merits.

His voice has stopped annoying me; I’ve started describing his hair as “flowing” rather than “lesbian-chic.”

Follow this up with music, where the kid has literally not made a wrong move. I think I’ve capped off at listening to the song “Sorry” eight times in a row in an hour and I’m still not sick of it. In the last couple of weeks alone he’s showed off his insane vocal range accompanied by nothing but an acoustic guitar on Ellen, and then got his white-boy groove on dancing in a bin of water at the AMAs.

And although I’m not heading off to Google naked, or even half-naked pictures of him anytime soon (ya I saw the Calvin Klein ad, it made me feel weird), I have started to notice there’s a certain Zac Morris quality to him that really lights the 10-year-old torch in me.

It took me 5 years of ups and downs to get here but I’ve finally arrived. We had a tumultuous beginning but now I’ve fallen headfirst into a pile of fangirl.

I’m drinking the Kool-Aid, I’m wearing the headband, I’m buying the t-shirt.

I’m a 30-year old Belieber and damn proud of it.