"Love Takes Time" is a song written by Mariah Carey and Ben Margulies, and produced by Walter Afanasieff for Carey's debut album, Mariah Carey(1990). It was released as the album's second single in the third quarter of 1990. It was the first of several adult contemporary-influenced Carey ballads to be released as a single, and its protagonist laments the loss of a lover and confesses that "love takes time" to heal and that her feelings for her ex-lover remain. It became Carey's second number 1 single in the United States and Canada, but was only a moderate success elsewhere.

Mariah Carey's debut album for the label was completed and being mastered when she wrote the song with Ben Marguiles. "It was sort of a gospelish thing I was improvising, then we began working on it," Marguiles relates. "It was on a work tape that we had...and we recorded a very quick demo. It was just a piano vocal demo - I played live piano, and she sang it."

Carey was on a mini-tour of ten states, playing acoustically with a piano player and three back-up singers. While on a company plane, she played the demo of "Love Takes Time" for Columbia Records president Don Ienner. "All the important guys were on the plane," Marguiles recalls. "Tommy Mottola, Ienner, and Bobby Colomby." Carey was told the song was a "career-maker," and that it had to go on the first album. She protested - her album was already being mastered, and she intended this ballad for her next release.

The demo was sent to producer Walter Afanasieff. When Carey flew west to work with Narada Michael Walden on some tracks for her first album, Tommy Mottola and Don Ienner were impressed with Afanasieff's work and gave him an executive staff producer job with the label.

"I guess to see if he made the right choice, (Tommy) called me up one day," remembers Afanasieff. "He said, 'We've got this Mariah Carey album done, but there's a song that she and Ben Marguiles wrote that is phenomenal, and I want to try everything we can to put it on the album.' I said, 'What do you want me to do?' and he said, 'You only have a couple of days, but are you ready to cut it?' I couldn't believe the opportunity that it was. I'd never produced anything by myself up until that time."

The demo was very close to what Mottola wanted the finished product to be, according to Afanasieff. "We cut the song and the music and the basics in about a day - and the only reason is this deadline. 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 very quickly, and then (engineer) Dana (Jon Chapelle) 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."

Afanasieff heard from Columbia executives as soon as they received the mix. They wanted Carey's vocal a little louder, so a remix was quickly completed. The producer asked if the song would still make the debut album, and was told, "We're going to do our best."

When the album was released, "Love Takes Time" was not listed on the cassette or compact disc. "(On) some of the original first copies of the record, they didn't have time to print the name of the song," Marguiles laughs. "And so the song's on there, but it doesn't say that it's on there. It was a song that actually was strong enough to stop the pressing...I don't know if they had to throw away a few hundred copies."

"Love Takes Time" was another success like Carey's debut single "Vision of Love" in the United States: it reached number 1 in its ninth week on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent three weeks at the top of the chart, from November 10 to November 24, 1990. It spent seventeen weeks in the top forty and the RIAA certified it gold. It topped every other Billboardchart for which it was eligible (including the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks). Because its success was divided over two calendar years it did not rank high on Billboard's year-end charts, making 76 on the 1990 chart and 69 on the 1991 chart.

However, "Love Takes Time" failed to emulate its U.S. success in any other market except Canada, where it topped the Canadian Singles Chart for one week. "Love Takes Time" reached the top ten in New Zealand. It did not make much of an impact elsewhere, becoming a moderate top twenty hit in Australia, and top forty hit in the UK and the Netherlands, but failed to reach the top forty in Germany.

The song did not receive as many awards as "Vision of Love", but it still managed to win a BMI R&B Award for Song of the Year and a Songwriter Award.

The single's video, directed by Jeb Brien and Walter Maser, features Carey walking around a beach after a man walks away with luggage in Venice, Los Angeles, California. The video is not included on the DVD/home video #1's(1999) because Carey has admitted she is ashamed of it. A live performance of the song filmed at Proctor's Theatre in New York in 1993 was included instead.

Kelly Clarkson did a cover of this song while performing at a mini tour in 2003.

Worldwide CD single

UK CD single

European CD maxi-single

UK CD maxi-single