Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber have both shown that they’ve moved on from their on-again, off-again relationship in their own ways.

(She’s used a major performance at an awards show; he’s used a secret music video message.) But for all these hidden signs and subtle nods to their breakup, neither has opened up too much about their split. But in a recent cover interview with Complex, Bieber revealed why he thinks the relationship didn’t work out and what he’s learned from it all.

“Don’t fall in love,” he told Complex. “No, I’m just kidding. I learned a lot. I moved in with my girlfriend when I was 18. Started my own life with her. It was a marriage kind of thing. Living with a girl, it was just too much at that age. But we were so in love. Nothing else mattered. We were all about each other.”

But as Bieber sees it, when you’re that wrapped up in each other, you’re bound to become disappointed. “When it’s like that and you get your value from that, people will always disappoint you,” he said. “Your girl or your dude, they’re always going to disappoint you. Your full identity can’t be in that person. My identity was in her. Her identity was in me. When stuff would happen, I would lose my freakin’ mind, and she would lose her mind, and we would fight so hard because we were so invested in each other.”

So what has he learned from the relationship? “Love is a choice,” he revealed. “Love is not a feeling. People have made it seem in movies that it’s this fairy tale. That’s not what love is. You’re not gonna want to love your girl sometimes but you’re gonna choose to love her. That’s something in life that I had to figure out. I can’t lean on people. I got to lean on God. I gotta trust in him through all my situations.

Then, hopefully, my other relationships will flourish around me. But if I’m gonna be so invested in you, if you die, or something happens to you, I’m gonna be so destroyed, I won’t be able to go on. If I can love you and know that I’m not who I am because you’re being nice to me, but that I love you and I think you’re an incredible person but you’re just as broken as I am on the inside. We’re all just trying to figure it out.”

And Bieber also revealed that he’s using what he learned in a new relationship that’s just beginning for him: “You get scarred from certain things,” he said. “Even like—I’m kind of seeing this girl, right? I’m shy about doing or saying certain things, and then I say it and it’s not even a problem. And I’ll remember when I couldn’t….You’re just scarred and you don’t do something because in your last relationship they’d freak out, but [the new person is] just like, ‘What are you talking about?'”