Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘EMOTION’ showed me the dark secret about true love

On a snowy December day last year, in a kitschy little café, I convinced myself that I’d met my husband. 

He was tall, with a handsome jaw and sleepy brown puppy-dog eyes framed beautifully by thin silver glasses. He had tousled sandy hair and sported sharp wool clothes. After briefly meeting me at a bar, he asked if I’d get coffee with him the following day. 

I couldn’t remember the last time someone asked me out on a date. A few months earlier, I’d ended things with my longtime partner, and though I’d convinced myself that no part of me felt ready to date again, I longed for the companionship and intimacy I’d grown accustomed to. Toronto winters are brutal without someone to hold on to. 

I sat at the café and journalled as I waited for him to walk in. When he eventually did, it was in a peacoat, flashing a goofy little smile. We sat and talked for eight hours that bolted by in a blink. The conversation was natural yet thrilling; both deep and easy. By its end, the café was closing. We stumbled into the freezing air and shared a cigarette and he held me in his great arms and kissed me. I would have fainted if I wasn’t shivering so bad.

I didn’t sleep that night. I was too busy planning our wedding. I thought it would make sense to host it in Toronto, even though he lived in Montreal, because his family lived in Ontario and that way we could focus on writing our vows instead of translating catering invoices from French to English. I thought about the ivory flowers we’d throw and the champagne we’d spill. I thought about my mother crying, her only child wedded at last. I thought, I thought, I thought. 

The following day, as nonchalantly as possible, I sent him a crazed text first thing in the morning, asking when he wanted to hang out again and if he was free Thursday, would he want to do something Thursday with me, please? He didn’t answer until the evening. He said he’d be busy until he had to go back to Montreal. I texted him back “no worries!” and then went home and lay in bed and stared at the wall in silence for five hours, mentally enumerating everything wrong with my face, body and personality while trying to convince myself that dying alone could be fun, actually. And then, as I have during every perilous moment I’ve endured over the past ten years, I put on EMOTION by Carly Rae Jepsen. 

Jepsen’s magnum opus is often noted for its synth-forward, ’80s-inspired production; for its jubilant and infectious hooks; for its precise excavation of intense feeling; for its bleeding and thunderstruck heart. It soars to remarkable heights, scraping something like heaven and landing like sugar on the ear. Its lows are less lauded, but make no mistake: EMOTION is a dark album. She reaches for joy on anthems like “Run Away With Me” and “Let’s Get Lost,” basking in the sunny glow of a crush, bathing in the dopamine. But she’s equally interested in the cold and black night that follows. 

Jepsen spends much of EMOTION in anguish. She doesn’t write about reciprocal love on the album; instead, she focuses her pen on unconsummated desire. “Run Away With Me” is a dream, not a memory (“I’d run away with you,” she vows); “I Really Like You” is an imagined confession, not one that’s acted upon; “Gimmie Love” is the tortured cry of a desperate and unsatisfied wreck toppled over by her limerence (“I know I said that I’m too scared to try/ But I still think about you”). EMOTION is an extended study of that precipitous, precious, painful moment between catching feelings and saying them out loud. And while Jepsen captures its ecstasy, she also embodies its agony.

On another cold night last winter, I met another man I didn’t marry. We’d arranged a date at a nice cocktail bar over an app. He arrived before me. His looks were striking; a perfect dollop of dark hair framed his angular, olive-toned face. His clothes were delicate and his fingers were long. He was already halfway through a drink.

He led with a cutting story about a co-worker that got me laughing. Our thighs grazed and I saw his eyes flash. We finished our drinks and went to another bar, a much less refined one that I’d chosen, and sat beside a plastered straight couple. “Are you on a first date?” the girl asked. We said yes. “You seem much closer than that,” she slurred, beer spilling out of her glass. My date’s hands curled into mine. “We figured you’d been together for a month.” They bought us shots and talked with us until my date nudged me to leave. We went home together. On paper, it was perfect. 

We kept seeing each other. We often talked about the future and retained some sort of connection, but we never recaptured the electricity of that first night. Also, on one of our early dates, he went on a tirade about how Carly Rae Jepsen is overrated. Clearly, we were doomed.

Nevertheless, I tried to make it work. I bought him dinners and flowers and told him how great he was, and once in a while he’d say something nice in return then warn me not to expect more because he wasn’t the compliment type. I’d send him songs I thought he’d like and he wouldn’t listen to them; I’d text “good morning” and hear back in the evening. Eventually, his attention petered out completely, but still he kept me on by a thread, sending an occasional text, dangling plans over my head that never seemed to materialize. 

“Show me if you want me,” Jepsen sings on “All That.” “Let me be the one.” She wants to feel chosen, for someone to not only take the love off her back but to exchange it for theirs. “In your fantasy, dream about me/ And all that we could do with this emotion,” she coos on EMOTION’s title track, correctly identifying the electric potential between her and the object of her affection as a heavy thing; a load that, if shared, could amount to something powerful. 

Those songs soothed me last winter while I dreamt of a future between me and that boy that I knew would never come to pass. I thought I could think a connection into being, that if I concentrated hard enough and I was perfect enough that he would love me and the relationship would arrange itself into place, despite our obvious incongruencies. All I’ve ever wanted is to think that someone is all that, and to have them think that of me. I felt I had to try.

Sometimes I feel burdened by the weight of all this love I’ve got to give. I feel like I’ve spent my life trying to find the person who will take it from me. With the boy with the gorgeous hair, I felt like I was begging him to take it off my hands, but he just wouldn’t. It’s hard enough to carry a heavy load on your own, but to have someone perfectly capable of helping stand there with their arms crossed makes it feel so much heavier. 

On our final date, I decided it was time for me to make the leap of faith, to have my “Run Away With Me” moment. It was the part where I had to say all I was feeling. I walked my not-boyfriend to his bus stop after lunch (which I paid for) and asked him, point-blank, how he felt about me. He blinked hard. “I … feel good,” he stuttered out. Unsatisfied, I pressed him. I said that I really liked him, and that I wanted to continue seeing him. Did he feel the same? “I said I feel good,” he snapped. “I don’t know what else to say.” And I stood there for ten of the longest seconds of my life and assessed the dead thing between us, the emotion that wasn’t there. I kissed him goodbye and haven’t seen him since. 

EMOTION is a tragic tale. It begins with “Run Away With Me,” which paints a rich portrait of a woman who is convinced she’s found the person who will liberate her. But after the spark, she has to deal with the fallout. Along the way, she finds herself both devastated and ecstatic. She is dazed by her big feelings, paralyzed by their magnitude. By the end of the album, our protagonist has found that her fantasies went unrealized. And she is furious.

“I tried to be so perfect,” she cries on album closer “When I Needed You,” at last accepting that her glimmer of hope was a mirage. It’s pathetic and it’s sad, but it belies EMOTION’s most revelatory nugget of truth: satisfaction cannot be found in a fantasy.

On the song’s sugary chorus, atop punchy synths, she wishes she could be someone new so her beloved would choose her. Then, she whirls on him. “But where were you for me?” After an album full of almost and maybe, she finds certainty by turning her self-loathing outward. 

After my kiss goodbye with Mr. Hair, I seethed for a couple weeks. I hated him for not loving me, and I cursed every second I’d wasted trying to please him. It was all very melodramatic. But the truth is, we committed the same crime. We both stuck around for somebody that didn’t like us for who we were. 

Three months ago, I met a man I wanted to see again. It was another chance encounter at a bar, this time in New York City. I will never forget the way I felt when I first looked at him. I saw him and the world fell away. “Who gave you eyes like that?” I thought. “Said you could keep them?”

Evidently, he felt the same. We had a whirlwind weekend together in New York. Every second felt fateful. He felt right in my arms. I felt cherished in his. We’ve spoken every day since.

Oddly, the despair that has been a hallmark of every crush I’ve ever had has not been present this time around. Sure, he makes me happy, ludicrously so, but more than that, he calms me. Loving him has been easy, and likewise, he makes me feel adored. He doesn’t just listen to my song recommendations—he proactively streams whole albums because I mention them in passing then voice-notes me track-by-track reviews. He mails me love letters and calls me in the middle of his workday just to get a moment of my time. He laughs at my jokes even when they’re not funny. He makes me feel chosen every minute of every day. He sees who I am and loves it all anyway, and I look at him and love what I see. It’s not a fairy tale where I fly off into the sunset. It’s a connection so magnetic it pulls me back to earth. 

I have listened to EMOTION more than I have listened to any other album. I fell for it when it came out, and in the decade that’s followed, it has grown like a moss all over me. It has empowered me to daydream, to imagine the day when I’ll be swept off my feet by someone perfect who will take all this heavy love off my back. But now that I’m nurturing this new romance, this tender thing that makes me feel whole, I think I finally see what Carly Rae Jepsen has been trying to tell me. Real love can’t be found in a dream. Real love wakes you up. 

This week at Xtra, we’re celebrating a decade of Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION with a series called E•MO•TEN. This essay is one of several pieces we’re publishing to commemorate the album’s deep impact on the LGBTQ2S+ community. You can check out the rest of the series here.