I’m sick and tired of hearing about yearning: tired of yearning for yearning’s sake, sick of its over romanticization and the way people define themselves by it. In fact, I am begging to hear about literally anything else.

There is power in yearning, but only as a means to an end, not as an endstate in itself.

2025 was dubbed the year of yearning by numerous outlets (and 2024 had plenty of yearning articles as well, if we’re being honest!), and it was unfortunately quite accurate; everyone is craving romance. Dinner table discourse, best friend group chats, and social media videos alike are filled with frustrations about the rote routine of swiping left and right on dating apps, sadness about the lack of awe and excitement to date, an intense fear about the impossibility of finding it in real life. This has been perfectly coupled with obsession with shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty, heralded for its depiction of yearning.

And yet, in this deep expression of a desire for romance, there is still an attachment to one’s status quo, a cavernous desire met with little action. In fact, 63% of singles, tracked in the ‘Singles in American’ survey, expressed that there’s more passivity in making the first move in dating, especially as there’s more uncertainty around what someone is looking for. If everyone is craving love, you’d assume that the action, the pursuit or the intention, would increase — but instead, we’re seeing the opposite. As these cravings have grown, there has only become more passivity in an individual’s pursuits of love: less boldness, more fear, lives colored by desire and a perpetual fear of rejection.

In The Cut’s article on 2025’s adult yearning wave, our writer asks the women themselves if this yearning has motivated new action, a desire to date, a want to pursue or become anew. The resounding answer for many of them was no. Yearning has taken center stage, while attempts to fulfill it, what it would look like to create worlds that honor that yearning, have not even so much as taken a backseat but seem to be absent from the car entirely. It’s as though we’ve begun to equate yearning with inaction.

And listen, I’m not trying to shame anyone here. Romance (in friendship and in love!) is hard, and I can only imagine what it’d be like for a straight woman. Nonetheless, there is something sinister about the promise of yearning with nowhere for it to go. There is an intentional emptiness being crafted that I think we owe it to fight.

In a way, I think we’ve become addicted to yearning; we’ve all become stuck in a masturbatory cycle of longing for longing’s sake, of yearning for what we can’t have without searching for the tools to achieve it, however difficult, of always choosing to yearn for more instead. We’re told we’re in a loneliness epidemic, where everyone is profoundly lonely but somehow unable to connect to any of the lonely people around them. As many before me have said, a lack of community among us is intentional; nothing benefits the fascist regime slowly taking hold in our country more than a disparate and disconnected populace who struggle to build friendships, let alone long-standing and effective coalitions. It certainly is not the first time we’ve witnessed capitalism’s dedication to driving holes in our hearts and minds, promising that overconsumption and the slow destruction of the earth in the novel pursuit of more stuff is the only way to fix it.

To me, the yearning industrial complex is just one facet of this, one of the many industries dedicated to keep us in search of something nameless and intangible in hopes we continue to try to buy it, in hopes we forget the answers are in one another. The detachment of our wants from the requisite actions necessary to fulfill them, and the investment much of the world’s industries has in keeping us in this cycle, is illustrated by the extreme prevalence of dating apps, with 53% of the 18-29 population in use of them. These apps keep us locked in a perpetual cycle of looking, our lives dictated by the whims of who an algorithm decides we deserve to speak to. Consumers have begun to suspect this so much that 2024 culminated in a class action suit against Match Group — a conglomerate that owns just about every dating app you’ve ever used — and its misleading advertising around ‘finding love’, when in reality many of its tactics are seemingly purposefully addictive, similar to a gambling app promising a big payout if you just keep spending a little more, if you just swipe a little longer. If you just keep paying for a premium service, maybe your great love is just around the corner.

Another particularly concerning development of this phenomena is the growing use of AI chatbot partners and friends. In my most recent Reddit deep dive, I found chatbot lovers asking their respective partners to write them longing letters in the style of Napoleon’s letters to the woman he longed most for, Josephine. Ignoring the concerning nature of the romanticization of various conquerors in our current climate, there is something quite illustrative about asking a chatbot to yearn for you. AI chatbot partners are often critiqued for the way they disconnect us from each other in favor of a simulation, but this seems to indicate that many have stepped even further away. It’s not a simulation of connection, but a simulation of the yearning for connection. An attachment to the perpetual state of not having, a romanticization of the pain that has kept various people apart for tangible reasons without a subsequent attachment to the beauty of coming together, the power of building a world where one can come together.

The romance industry has been here a long time, Hallmark movies and early-aughts romcoms selling us unfeasible grand gestures without the realities of maintaining love on the day-to-day, spoonfeeding us the beauty of the nuclear family and ‘first comes love, then comes marriage, then baby and a baby carriage’. But it seems the industry has branched out, has found something far more lucrative in realizing that romance does not even have to be promised, but instead just the concept of it, the idea that it exists, is enough to sell. In being sold a new form of yearning, it’s being even more insidiously co-opted from a motivation, from the exploration of possibility, to a reminder of one’s despair. In infiltrating this sacred space and convincing us that something in us is missing, it has done something far worse: It has stripped us of something that is our very power; our ability to long for, to want more, and to envision its possibility.

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And, let’s be real, nobody knows yearning like the queers. Sapphic yearning is everywhere, and even the discourse surrounding recent hit queer show Heated Rivalry has heavily centered on the yearning that often undergirds the queer experience. Queer yearning isn’t for no reason though, it is illustrative of an inability to act on our desires, on a longing for more in a world that has promised you so little, that has dangled true unabashed love above your head like forbidden fruit. And yet, I think queer yearning is so powerful not because of its limitations but because of the way our very yearning has been the fuel that has helped us send wrecking balls through the old world order in favor of new ones. To me, the power of a story like Shane and Ilya’s is not the longing itself, is not the pain for pain’s sake, but what understanding and honoring their deepest wants eventually led them to do. In Episode 5, in which Scott Hunter takes Kip onto the ice and kisses him in front of the whole world, is the power of yearning realized. This is yearning’s strength, not in perpetual suffering, not in romanticizing queer pain, but in realizing it can be the fuel to your fight, that which gives you strength to demand a new world, to demand a space for yourself in the sport you love. And the very power of this yearning coming to fruition reverberates through queer athletes, most notably Shane and Ilya themselves. It shows them their yearning is a weapon, a stone to sharpen their creativity and strengthen their resolve.

Yearning is about possibility. It is about challenging what we have been told is unrealistic and daring to imagine more, daring to articulate exactly what you want and moving mountains to craft it. It allows us to reject inevitability. Even if our exact yearning is never fully realized, it gives us the right to strive, to know what we deserve, to be reflective not of what we can’t have but of what we ought to, and that powerful yearning can even be passed through generations. What are the rights we currently have if not the manifestation of the yearning of our elders?

Yearning reminds me much of the liberatory concept of radical imagination. We cannot create new futures before we are able to imagine them. Our ability to imagine is powerful and comes heavily from our ability to long, to know there must be more even when we can’t picture it quite yet. Queer folks have been doing so for ages. The ability to imagine new ways of relating, or building new ideas of found families and friendships, queerplatonic connections and new methods of child-rearing, of reconnecting with our queer ancestral practices in worlds where they have been demonized — all of this is exactly that.

The attempt to divorce us from this is thus even more insidious, particularly in conversations around love and relating among one another. For sapphic folks in particular, the world tries to divorce us from our agency. When we sit around and embrace yearning as definitive of our experience, when we wax poetic on the internet about how none of us can talk to women — a skill issue I refuse to codify into the queer experience, because some of us do in fact have game — we buy into this notion that we are unable to have, that we can only want. I refuse to live in a city where I can actually hold a woman’s hand on the train, a right many of my ancestors would have only dreamed of, one I’m sure they yearned for, and not do so because I am so detached from my own personal choices that I am too scared to ask her if she likes me too.

Heterosexual society already teaches many of us deemed women that we ought to be passive in love, courted and silent receivers of other people’s desires, and this is only strengthened by the yearning industrial complex. But we have the ability to break free of this. In our queer worlds, we have the capacity to  create a microcosm free from the rest of the world’s ignorance. We have the ability to create a world where women shoot their damn shot when they want and believe their desires matter just as much as everyone else’s.

But this certainly doesn’t just apply to queer folk: This is a general call to, particularly when the barriers are of our own making, fight to act on our own desires! We literally don’t have forever!

I spend much of my time on the internet on my soapbox about the importance of shooting your damn shot, about creating the meet-cute you want in the world. As senseless as this may seem, dating, romance, love, the way we relate to one another matter and every power that be knows it. The barriers to us building among each other, loving one another, are intentional, and our attempts to get over them must be as well.

Yearn in your room all you want, look longingly at the beautiful girls on Instagram all you want, just make sure you send her that damn DM! PLEASE!