The Yearners Are Rising: A New Kind of Romantic Is Logging Back On
Tuesday, July 8, 2025.
We were told to play it cool.
Never double-text. Never ask twice. Don’t seem needy. Don’t seem too interested. Don’t seem.
The whole point of modern dating, apparently, was to become an emotionally evasive brand manager for your own personality, hoping to be liked but never audited. It worked, sort of—until it didn’t.
Now, in 2025, something peculiar is happening. A new breed of romantic has emerged, blinking into the daylight after years of ironic detachment and algorithm fatigue.
They’re called Yearners.
They are done waiting. Done ghosting. Done pretending to be indifferent while quietly dissolving into their sheets listening to the same three sad songs on loop.
They want something real. And—this is key—they are willing to say so out loud.
A Short History of Pretending Not to Care
For most of recent history, being earnest in dating was treated like bringing a kazoo to a chess tournament. You could try, but everyone would stop taking you seriously.
Desire was to be suggested, not declared. Interest had to be encrypted in vague compliments and time delays. Vulnerability was reserved for pillow talk, if you ever made it that far.
Coolness, in this sense, was not just a pose. It was a defense. And a market strategy. When dating apps made potential partners infinite, the stakes of rejection became unbearable. So people stopped saying anything real.
And yet—somewhere between the tenth “what are you up to tonight” and the fiftieth emotionally inert situationship—a counter-movement began.
The Yearner Archetype: Sincere, Tired, and Done with Cool
Yearners are not necessarily soft. They’re not always gentle. But they are clear.
They ask questions and expect answers. They say, “I liked you,” even if it makes them sweat.
They don’t see follow-up texts as needy—they see them as what grown humans do when they enjoyed someone’s company.
In a recent Wired article, a dating coach described the movement as a quiet revolution: people opting out of gamified intimacy in favor of actual mutuality.
A study cited in the same piece showed that nearly half of app users now prefer “sincere emotional engagement” to “playful banter.” Which is polite researcher language for: enough with the goddamn winking gifs.
The Yearner doesn’t ghost. They grieve. They might even call. They are, in short, the most radical figure in modern romance: someone who admits they care.
Why Now? Because People Are Fried
Emotional avoidance is not just a personality quirk. It’s often a trauma response that got good at branding.
But it turns out you can only live so long on breadcrumbed affection and photo-filtered flirtation before your nervous system starts filing complaints.
Polyvagal theory suggests that consistent emotional safety—attunement, eye contact, mutual curiosity—actually downregulates the fight-or-flight system (Porges, 2011).
Yearners are doing this naturally. They’re the real-time nervous system co-regulators in a dating economy designed to stimulate cortisol, not comfort.
If the avoidant dater feels like a scratch-off ticket—bright, promising, and mostly air—then the yearner feels like a well-worn book. You can open it. Read it. Know how it ends.
And in a world obsessed with novelty, that kind of predictability is starting to feel dangerously intimate.
Emoji Research and the End of Irony
A recent study out of the University of Texas found that couples who use expressive text communication—think longer messages, thoughtful responses, emotional language—report higher satisfaction and closeness than those who keep things brief and ironic (Lastella et al., 2019).
In other words: nuance is back. So is punctuation. The full stop is no longer aggressive. It’s adult.
This is not about being performatively romantic. It’s about being present. Which is harder. It costs something. But it also yields something better than what most dating content peddles: actual relational security.
Yearning in Practice (or, How Not to Terrify Someone by Caring)
If you’re tempted to try yearning in the wild, here’s a humble checklist:
Say what you feel before it turns to resentment.
Ask direct questions. The answer might be no. That’s survivable.
Stop branding yourself. Start introducing yourself.
Follow up. Not frantically. Not compulsively. Just clearly.
The first few times will feel like jumping into a lake before sunrise. You’ll gasp. You’ll regret it. And then you’ll feel incredibly awake.
Final Thought: Sincerity Is a Scar, Not a Skill
Here’s what most people won’t tell you. Yearning doesn’t feel good. It feels exposed.
Unstable. It makes you remember things you thought you’d safely buried under sarcasm and casual hookups.
But the fact that you still want—that you still care, even after everything—is the most human thing about you.
And in 2025, it may also be the most attractive.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Karakurt, G., & Silver, K. E. (2013). Emotional availability and relationship satisfaction in dating couples: An attachment perspective. Journal of Family Therapy, 35(3), 247–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6427.2011.00574.x
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.
Wired. (2025, July). Yearners are sick of playing it cool on dating apps. https://www.wired.com/story/yearners-are-sick-of-playing-it-cool-on-dating-apps?utm_source=chatgpt.com
The Guardian. (2025, July 5). Text therapy: study finds couples who use emojis in text messages feel closer. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/05/the-impact-of-emojis-on-relationship-satisfaction-study?utm_source=chatgpt.com