On his son’s first birthday, pop megastar Liam Payne has spoken about how baby Bear was “a massive explosion” in the middle of his relationship with Cheryl.

The 24 year old former One Direction star has had a rather crazy last 12 months, launching a highly successful solo career beginning with global hit ‘Strip That Down’ as well as welcoming his son Bear back in March 2017 after a whirlwind romance with girlfriend Cheryl, formerly of Girls Aloud.

However, recent months have seen tabloid and social media rumours abound that his relationship with Cheryl is under serious strain, and that they might be about to break up. Payne sat down with the Evening Standard Magazine on Thursday (March 22nd) to set the record straight, admitting that while there are unique pressures to their relationship, they are making it work.

Liam CherylLiam with Cheryl in 2017

“We just had this massive explosion of impact in the middle of our lives, and we’re trying to blend all that together,” he said about becoming a first-time father this time last year. “It’s just picking up the pieces, the corner pieces of this puzzle, to make this perfect family life.”

“In every other aspect of the way my life works, everything’s eccentric: you can go out to the shops and buy loads of things or you can go to a random country for the day. It’s all weird, so why would my relationship ever blend in to what society thinks anyway? Because the whole of my life is nuts. So it’s just putting all of that bag of nuts-ness together and making it work.”

In the end, it’s “about making it work for us, not making it work how people think it should work”.

More: Liam Payne confesses relationship problems with Cheryl

With that in mind, he and Cheryl decided very early on that they would maintain the utmost privacy when it came to baby Bear. No pictures have ever appeared in the public realm, apart from a very select handful on their Instagram accounts.

“Rather than being pictured and being put in places, I wanna give him the chance [of his own life],” Payne explained. “If I take it away from him now, he never has the chance to go back.”

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The singer also addressed the speculation that surrounded their so-called ‘united front’ at the BRIT Awards this time last month.

“The funniest thing was a week before we were getting married. The next week we’re splitting up,” he says. “And the thing for me is, I just like to think we’re somewhere in the middle. You know, we have our struggles — like of course I’m not gonna sit here and say that everything’s absolutely fine and dandy, because of course you go through different things, and that’s what a relationship is. But we go through them together as a family and that’s the most important thing for me.”

“This part of mine and my missus’s relationship was never not going to happen,” he continues, reflecting on the rapid pace at which things have happened for them. “There was always going to be a little bit of tenseness in the way we sort ourselves out, but tell me a relationship in the world that doesn’t go through a spot like that? It’s about whether you make it through or not, together, is the main point there I guess.”

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