Gen Z’s Newest Dating Craze Is Actually An Ancient Desire

That great authority on all things relationship-based, Tinder, has declared 2026 to be the year of “yearning.” Tinder’s dating expert elaborates thus: “Yearning isn’t just fantasy or playing hard to get. It’s anticipation, emotional investment, and a bit of uncertainty that makes someone matter to you. Attraction needs space to breathe. When everything is instant, nothing feels special.”

According to such a definition, the state of yearning seems like a rejection of instant gratification. Yet the opposite of instant gratification is delayed gratification, something that assumes a clear relationship between sacrifice and reward. If you study hard, save diligently, and persevere consistently, success will eventually follow. There is an assumption hardwired into this formula: If you fulfill your part of the bargain, you will receive your reward. 

Yearning, however, is different as the ending remains uncertain. There is no formula to be followed here. Where delayed gratification asks us to postpone satisfaction, yearning asks us to live without knowing whether satisfaction will arrive at all. We might never receive what we yearn for, in which case, was it wrong to have hoped for it at all? 

This question has occupied thinkers since classical antiquity. Tinder is just late to the party. The classical Greek philosopher Plato understood desire as a fundamental feature of human existence. In “The Symposium,” written around 385-370 B.C., Plato staged an imaginary dinner party at which the guests debated the nature of love and desire. The dialogue arrives at this conclusion: Human beings yearn because they are incomplete creatures, forever reaching toward beauty, goodness, and love beyond themselves. Presiding over this vision is Eros, the god of love and personification of desire, that restless impulse that moves human beings beyond their present condition toward something they do not yet possess.

At the opposing end of the philosophical spectrum, the Stoics took a dimmer view, arguing that attachment to things beyond our control is a source of much human misery. As Marcus Aurelius put it in his “Meditations” (composed during the 170s A.D.): “Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not … do away with all fancies. Cease to be passion’s puppet. Limit time to the present.” Better, the Stoics believed, to cultivate tranquility than to spend one’s life aching after uncertain desires and things.

Ever since, Western thought has fluctuated between these two positions. Is longing evidence that we need to change our thinking, or is longing itself part of a flourishing life?

If Plato and the Stoics debated whether longing is a defect or a virtue, the stories we tell often reveal a more nuanced reality. That subtle observer of human nature Jane Austen probed the extremities of human yearning in her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility,” which has just been beautifully reimagined for the screen, Marianne Dashwood yearns passionately for Willoughby, while Elinor’s longing for Edward Ferrars, and his for her, is more reserved but no less profound. The emotional energy of the story lies not in the marriages at the end but in the long stretches of waiting, disappointment, and hope that precede them. This harks back to a social world in which feelings and desires were not instinctively acted upon but were restrained within a moral order that prioritized religious, familial, and financial obligations over self-gratification. 

As one commentator has noted, there are important differences between the moral world of this new film adaptation and that of Emma Thompson’s celebrated 1995 version. Yet both films recognize that Marianne’s suffering is not merely unfortunate but transformative. Through disappointment she acquires self-knowledge and a better understanding of herself and others. The newer adaptation may express this journey in a more emotionally Gen Z way, but Marianne still regrets that she had let unregulated yearnings for Willoughby overwhelm her emotions and risk her health. The new movie gives Willoughby a scene of flouncy self-pity, revealing him as the story’s moral outlier, more at home in the relational promiscuity familiar to today’s Tinder generation.

Another tale of painful longing can be seen in “The Notebook,” the Nicholas Sparks novel that became a movie sensation in 2004 and which remains a fan favorite today. During years of separation from Allie Hamilton (a wealthy girl whose family drives a wedge between her and her socially inferior love), Noah Calhoun restores the house they once imagined sharing together, despite having no certainty that she will ever return. The house functions almost as a physical embodiment of yearning.

Both “Sense and Sensibility” and “The Notebook” make the same argument, one with which the Stoics might disagree. Desire should not be treated as an impediment because under the right conditions it can become creative, shaping either the soul or the world. Many have speculated that a lack of romantic fulfillment in Jane Austen’s own life was the source material she needed to write some of the most satisfying novels in the English language.

Yet our relationship with longing remains deeply ambivalent. For all the current enthusiasm for yearning, audiences are not always prepared to remain in a state of uncertainty. The film adaptation of “The Idea of You,” for example, changed the novel’s plot, in which our heroine Solène did not reunite with her much younger boyfriend, to give our lovers their happy ending. The movie version of “The Shawshank Redemption” famously added a final scene, missing from the original Stephen King novella and director Frank Darabont’s plan for the movie, so that the two main characters, wrongly convicted Andy Dufresne and his prison friend, Red, get their happy reunion. 

Even now, the old argument as to the value of yearning remains unresolved. Faced with sadness and uncertainty, some retreat toward a modern form of Stoicism, seeking emotional self-sufficiency by lowering expectations or extinguishing longing altogether. Others continue to insist that yearning tells us something important about who we are. Perhaps one of the best modern creative explorations of this ancient argument between the Stoics and the Platonists can be found in the 2004 movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” in which the sinister company Lacuna Inc. offers those overwhelmed by yearning and sadness over failed romances “a new and lasting peace of mind” by erasing their memories. 

The deeper irony of “Eternal Sunshine” is that its characters discover there is no technological solution to yearning. They also realize that the painful and unresolved experiences they wanted removed were not simply obstacles to happiness, but part of the fabric of a fully human life. In trying to eliminate longing, they inadvertently diminished themselves. The film therefore poses a larger question: If yearning survives our attempts to suppress it, might it be telling us something important about what it means to be human?

This was the intuition that fascinated British academic and Christian writer C.S. Lewis. In “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” the first work of fiction he wrote after his conversion to Christianity, Lewis told the story of a lifelong pursuit of “the Island,” a mysterious object of desire glimpsed in childhood and sought ever afterwards. Along the way the pilgrim repeatedly mistook the source of his longing for romantic love, beauty, achievement, status, or intellectual fulfillment. Yet each apparent destination proved unable to satisfy the yearning that drove him there. Lewis’ point was not that these things are worthless, but that they are signposts rather than destinations. Human beings, he suggested, are often mistaken about what they are really yearning for.

For all my strong reservations about Tinder’s moral anthropology, which reduces human beings from living souls to sexual bodies on a sliding scale of attraction, I find myself supporting its championing of yearning. Perhaps the newfound popularity of yearning among Tinder’s Gen Z consumers could even lead to a quiet rebellion against a culture that treats material or physical satisfaction as the highest good. One can only hope. 

C.S. Lewis suspected that our deepest longings are valuable not because they are always fulfilled, but because they point beyond themselves. If he was right, then yearning is more than a romantic mood or a dating trend. It is the persistent intuition that there is something greater than whatever happens to be immediately in front of us. Perhaps a crucial part of being a fulfilled human is the lifelong search for that elusive “something more.”

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Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.