My freshman year of college, I was half in love with a girl who rode a scooter through the halls of the art building. I’d see her in brief flashes, like a mirage on the way to my intro drawing class, so fast I could’ve imagined her. Against all odds—I thought she was way too cool for me—we became friends. Our dorms were on opposite sides of campus, but I’d still trek through the early November Massachusetts snow in my shitty, California-winter boots at midnight if she texted that she wanted to watch anime together. On the bed I’d push myself up against the wall, afraid to touch, hoping she was afraid too.
It felt so intense in the moment, but I can laugh about this moment years later, just like I can laugh about the time I biked ten miles in the snow because a crush wanted to (I wiped out on the rail bridge, fell on my ass and had a bruise for a week). Or any of the countless times I’ve changed the route I was walking just to pass by a crush’s classroom/dorm room/place of work “coincidentally.” Or any of the times I’ve played a video game with a boy even though I kind of hate video games. Or honestly, any time I’ve ever left the house for someone after 11 p.m. But even when it’s ridiculous, I love how just the pure possibility of romance can motivate me—whether to walk somewhere at midnight, write thousands of words in my journal or even just to notice new details in the world around me.
My love of having a crush has made me a lifelong believer in the fantasy. You know it well: the tension in the space before the kiss. The dreamy phase of every crush where you can speculate endlessly, unconstrained by the rigid borders of reality, because nothing’s actually happened yet. The realm of pure possibility.
I’m often drawn to people who feel the opposite way. My friends are people for whom crushes are an unbearable agony. They love to confess right away, to bring things into the real world, make them tangible. They don’t always understand my love of the fantasy. But it’s so painful, they say! Isn’t it better to have the certainty of reality? What’s the point of indulging the fantasy if so often it’s all for naught?
I’d argue that it’s not for nothing, not at all. Beyond any pure delight and enjoyment that we get from being in the space of fantasy, which I’d argue gives it intrinsic value (and makes the agony worth it, for me at least), I find the fantasy to be a deeply rich and creative space to exist in. The fantasy is a powerful generative engine—the sheer number of love songs in the world is proof enough of this.
Carly Rae Jepsen is someone who understands the fantasy, and I’d argue that no album better exemplifies her devotion to fantasy than EMOTION. The entire spectrum of the fantasy is contained in EMOTION—from the intense, electric sugar high of a new crush to the devastating heartbreak of being in unrequited love with a friend, and every shade of feeling in between.
Take the album’s lead single, “I Really Like You,” a song so pure in its sentiment that the inanity of its lyrics transcends the realm of the absurd and passes into the sublime. Which isn’t to say it’s not self-aware: “It’s way too soon, I know this isn’t love,” Jepsen sings, before launching into a chorus that uses the word “really” 12 times and the word “want” six.
But the ultimate expression of fantasy is probably on the album’s longest-lived hit, the propulsive and effervescent “Run Away With Me”—a song whose opening line makes me feel like I’m emotionally launching through the stratosphere. The soaring saxophone somehow captures the exact feeling of the drop in your stomach when your crush looks at you like that. “Take me to the feeling,” she sings, and though the feeling is never specified, you know what she’s talking about, deep in your bones.
And then there’s the meta-fantasy: the fantasy of being in someone else’s fantasy, as featured in the album’s title track. It’s almost violent: the song opens with her saying, in her characteristically coy tone, “Be tormented by me, babe,” before the chorus demands that her ex-lover or situationship or whoever she’s talking about dream about her: “In your fantasy, dream about me/ And all that we could do with this emotion.”
The flip side to the fantasy—and where I understand my friends who critique it—is that it’s often borne of the uncertainty and profound anxiety of not knowing where you stand with someone. It’s entirely in your head—and that makes most fantasy-lovers deeply neurotic. Our beloved Ms. Jepsen is no exception—EMOTION is a profoundly anxious album.
Jepsen’s anxiety is perhaps most palpable on “Your Type,” one of the ultimate unrequited love songs of our time. The pre-chorus reads like she’s having a nervous breakdown over text: “But I still love you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you/ I didn’t mean to say what I said/ I miss you, I mean it, I tried not to feel it/ But I can’t get you out of my head.”
Or take “Gimmie Love,” where she is once again crashing out over someone she’s unsure about. “I want what I want, do you think that I want too much?” she asks. Later in the song, she proclaims, “Wanna feel like this forever,” though she and the listener both know the fantasy can never last.
When you’re queer, so many of your desires have to live in your head, either because they’re actively unsafe for you to pursue or because you’ve been taught that they are taboo. Fantasy is a safe place in those moments, a necessary refuge. But as with any coping mechanism, part of growing up is learning how to recognize when you need to let it go.
At the end of the day, the fantasy is never truly about your relationship with the other person. It is about your relationship with yourself. But there’s a price to pay for the fantasy, beyond anxiety. My favorite song on EMOTION is actually one that’s not about the fantasy at all, but about the fallout: “Boy Problems,” where she laments the toll that her griping about love is taking on her relationship with her best friend. At the end of the day, for all she sings about wanting connection and wanting a partner, some of the times I’ve related to Jepsen most are the times when I’m single and enjoying it, and don’t really want to be with anyone at all.
Recently, I was talking to a friend about crushes (classic), and how we both have a tendency to run away with them and break our own hearts in the process. Like Jepsen herself, we’re both Scorpios—once our hearts latch on to something, we have a hard time letting go. The fantasy feeds itself, a 24/7 ouroboros of desire. My friend, though, was of the opinion that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Falling in love is a true luxury,” he said. In a world where things are well and truly fucked most of the time, who are we do deny ourselves such a pure and true pleasure, especially when it presents itself so rarely? The true value of the fantasy is that it’s grounded in hope—the potential of all that we could do with this emotion.
The last time I got my heart broken, it was summer. It felt so incredibly stupid to be lying on my bedroom floor, feeling so deeply miserable while the world outside spilled over almost cartoonishly with blooming flowers and sunshine. I would listen to “Your Type” over and over again, and the chorus’s sparkling synths would sound just like the fantasy I’d created in my head, and the beauty outside my door. Every time Jepsen sang, “I used to be in love with you/ You used to be the first thing on my mind,” it felt like an incantation to dispel my fantasy, which I was desperate to do at that point. But even in the throes of a heartbreak so complete it felt awe-inspiring, I didn’t regret having fallen into the fantasy again. Even lying on the floor, it all felt worth it.
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.
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