Wuthering Heights Has Made Us Feral For Yearning. The Reality Isn’t As Hot.

From hit series such as Heated Rivalry and Bridgerton to the most talked about movie of the moment, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, yearning is everywhere right now. Falling in love and living happily ever after? BORING – we want storylines with long, drawn out power dynamics, tortuous emotional restraint and hopefully, a moment of release.

Yearning, as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, is “a strong feeling of wishing for something, especially something that you cannot have or get easily” – and we can’t get enough of it.

You only have to search #yearning on TikTok to be flooded with videos (245k posts, in fact) to find romanticised clip after clip of Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff looking miserable on the Moors or videos of Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton staring down a camera with misty-eyes.

Meanwhile, the phrase ‘best yearning scenes’ has been Googled so many times in the last 30 days that it’s been classified as a ‘breakout’ term (Heathcliff’s finger sucking has a lot to answer for).

However, according to new research from Tinder, it turns out that many of us don’t just want these intense feelings in our pop culture, we want them mirrored in our own dating lives too.

Not content with yearning being restricted to screen, stage and page (yes, we see you too A Court of Thorns and Roses readers), 71% of UK singles aged 18-25 want love that feels as intense as it does in films or books, while two thirds (67%) say they love the feeling of being yearned after, and 61% enjoy yearning for someone they like.

However, is yearning really all it cracks up to be in practice in the real world?

Well, as chartered psychologist Dr Tracy King explains, one of the main issues with yearning is that a lot of it is based around uncertainty and it can actually lead us to have an unrealistic idea of the person we’re yearning for.

“When someone is just out of reach, the mind fills in the gaps,” she says. “You are not relating to a full, consistent picture of a person, you are relating to fragments and possibility. That creates intensity, but intensity is not the same thing as compatibility.”

In other words, you’re so wrapped up in this feeling of want and longing that you might be blind to the pitfalls of the person themselves – that this idea of them is actually more attractive than the reality of who they are.

We’ve all been there, when the thrill of the chase and the ‘will we, won’t we’ element of dating is absolutely intoxicating, but then when things eventually work out after painful uncertainty, everything feels a little… flat.

Tinder’s data actually echoes this, with 28% of UK singles saying they enjoy having a crush even if it doesn’t go anywhere i.e. the whole point is the feeling of longing over the actual fruition of a relationship.

And unfortunately the reason it can feel so delicious is because yearning sits in the brain’s same learning mechanism as intermittent reinforcement – and for this example, Dr Tracy uses rats (sorry Heathcliff).

“We can look at the effects of intermittent reinforcement from past behavioural psychology experiments using rats. When a reward was delivered consistently to the rats, their behaviour stayed steady.

“However, when the reward was delivered unpredictably, the behaviour became far more embedded. The uncertainty drove the animal to keep trying. Unpredictable rewards embed action and need far deeper.”

Apart from desperately trying not to make a joke about our exes and rats, how does this relate to our dating lives? Time to reintroduce our dating trend friend breadcrumbing, something which yearning relies upon, according to Dr Tracy.

“Yearning is exactly how breadcrumbing is able to work. A message arrives after silence. Interest appears and disappears. There is just enough contact to keep hope alive, but not enough consistency to create security. People may call this romance, or proof of how much they need and want the other but what is happening is nervous system activation plus a reward loop.”

Yearning suddenly isn’t as sexy when you think of it as a weapon for shitty dating behaviour, is it?

At the moment, pop culture tends to romanticise yearning because it looks like depth of feeling on screen but in real life, it is worth asking a more grounded question: is this feeling coming from mutual connection and real knowledge of the person, or is it being driven by inconsistency and the pull of possibility?

Sure, healthy love might not be as glamorous and sexy as yearning, but maybe we should leave the misery on the Moors and the unpredictable breadcrumbs for the rats.