What I Learned in the Year of Yearning

I assumed I would be yearned for. Practically every woman I saw on a screen or read about in a book always was. They were yearned after for their beauty, their mystique, their untouchableness. Not only an object of desire but of longing, aching, even - that's what I figured I'd be. That I'd stir up the animal impulses of men with something as simple as a look, or a tuck of hair behind my ear. That I'd inspire romance of the deepest, most disruptive, most consuming degree. Like it was my birthright.

High school taught me I'm no Helen of Troy. I'm no Cathy Earnshaw, either, and I'm certainly no Bella Swan. I'm "cute," I'm "funny," I'm "smart," but I'm not enough of anything to launch a man into the atmosphere where he'd spin the Earth backwards just for me. And to top it all off, somehow, contrary to the story I'd been sold, I was the one plagued with constant longing. I was the one with the cosmic, aching desire. I was the one with the grand romantic fantasies. But I couldn't muster enough charisma in a bat of my eyelashes to convert those feelings into real connections. I felt defeated by my lackluster feminine wiles. Until this year.

This year - the year of yearning - was a watershed moment for lovers like me. Crush culture came back with a bang (actually more of a pang, or an anguished groan), with characters like Conrad Fisher, whose dramatic longing for Belly on "The Summer I Turned Pretty" earned him the moniker "Yearnrad" Fisher. Jonathan Bailey, whose 2022 performance in "Bridgerton" solidified him as captain of the yearn yacht, delivered a masterclass in yearning when he waxed to Bustle about why "it's so important to shamelessly show" it. HBO subscribers, meanwhile, smoldered under the flames of "Heated Rivalry" - also known as yearning on ice - in which two horny hockey players exchange many charged glances and breathless, desperate kisses.

This year's pop culture was sopping with desire. Yet, the face of yearning in 2025 was still mostly male. Women yearners were more elusive. There were great, scornful breakup albums like Lily Allen's "West End Girl" and Sabrina Carpenter's "Man's Best Friend," both lamenting a lost love, less from a place of yearning and more from a place of spite. Elphaba yearns for Fiyero in "Wicked: For Good," though the "As Long As You're Mine" scene caught some heat from fans who said it wasn't "spicy" enough.

We did, however, get one, pure, agonizing example of female yearning this year, in Chappell Roan's "The Subway" music video. In it, we see the yearner's imagination brought to life: Roan stalks the streets of New York, a heady mix of heartache and hope behind her eyes. She gets dragged along by taxi cabs and sprints down sidewalks, seeing bits of the love she's lost in every stranger's face. She climbs towers and screams into a swirling twister of trash and does it all without pretending for even a second that she isn't leading with her big, beautiful, beating heart. It's four minutes and 31 seconds of raw, triumphant emotion - admitting that she lost, and throwing up her hands in surrender to the tornado of her feelings.

Somehow, after a lifetime of messaging that I should be the yearned-for and not the yearner, it only took one music video to bandage up a part of me that felt terminally inferior for failing at the doe-eyed ingénue schtick.

It helped lead to my discovery that there is freedom in yearning - that yearning can be a powerful manifestation of the female gaze. That yearning actually belongs to women; it's not just something that happens to us. Yearning is the ultimate expression of our desire. When women write yearning, it's not just, I think you're hot. It's, I'm lusting after you. It's, I'm fantasizing about building a life with you. Our yearning can be demure, and it can be feral.

In 2026, I want to see more women failing to get noticed, more women with unrequited crushes - and I want to hear from them about how that makes them feel. I want to see more women longing for anything - a romantic interest, sure, but also a friendship, a career, a cause, a place, a better world. Stories of women yearners are interesting and real and full, and we deserve more of them. And hopefully, at least occasionally, those women get what they're so fiercely hoping for.

Too often the women characters we get in pop culture come to us already complete, already perfect, without much that makes them human. Too often the meat of the story revolves around a man's growth as he tries to win that perfect woman's attention and heart. As a lifelong yearner and deeply imperfect woman, it's a relief to finally proclaim that sometimes I will be the loser, I will be the overlooked one. Sometimes I will be desired, yes, but if I'm vying to be desired always, I will frequently be disappointed. To desire - not just be the object of it - is empowering, even when it hurts.