Songfacts®:

• Mariah wrote this with songwriter Ben Margulies. It was intended for her second album, Emotions, but her label liked it so much they stopped presses of her first album, Mariah Carey, so it could be included. There are copies of Mariah Carey floating around that don't have "Love Takes Time" on the track list even though the song is still on the album. According to Margulies, there wasn't time to print the title on the original copies, which are a valuable piece of pop memorabilia. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Diana - Gold Coast, Australia
• This was Mariah's second single. It followed up "Vision Of Love."
• This song marked the beginning of Mariah's longtime association with Walter Afanasieff, who produced the single and went on to co-write her hits "Hero," "One Sweet Day," and "All I Want For Christmas Is You" (he also co-produced Celine Dion's Titanic weeper "My Heart Will Go On"). At the time, Afanasieff was still a rookie who'd never produced anything by himself, and the last-minute recording session would prove his worth to Columbia Records if he could pull it off.
  
  "We cut the song and the music and the basics in about a day - and the only reason is this deadline," he recalled in The Billboard Book Of #1 Hits by Fred Bronson. "It was do it or we were gonna miss out on the whole thing. We got the tape and recorded everything and we got on the plane and went to New York and did her vocals. She did all the backgrounds, practically sang all night… We came back to the studio that afternoon, and we had to fix one line that we needed to get from Mariah. She fixed that one line very quickly, then [engineer] Dana Jon Chappelle and I got back on the plane with the tape, went back to the studio in Sausalito, and mixed it. So it was a three-day process: a day and a half for music, kind of like a day for vocals, and a day for mixing."
  
  After another quick remix to boost the volume of Mariah's vocals, the song made it on the debut album.
• In the black-and-white music video, Mariah walks along a beach and contemplates the end of her relationship. Filmed at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, the clip was directed by Jeb Brien (Ozzy Osbourne's Don't Blame Me) and Wayne Maser (Mary J. Blige's "Not Gon' Cry"). Mariah recalled being freezing cold on the shoot and, upon viewing the completed video, she noticed the glue from her false eyelashes was visible. The singer said the experience was an example of how she used to let people make decisions about her style before she learned to speak up.
• This was used in the TV series Pose in the 2019 episode "Revelations."
• This was also Mariah's second #1 on the R&B chart.