On TikTok, Gyasi Alexander likes to hold “yap sessions” about all sorts of vulnerable topics—self-image issues, anxiety, why you shouldn’t romanticize forgiveness. He started posting videos like that last summer, following the end of an 11-year relationship, after a group of friends encouraged him to use the platform as an outlet to talk about his healing process. Lately, though, the 28-year-old retail sales worker who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, has decided to fully embrace, and talk about, his most vulnerable trait—being a yearner.
“Yearning is a little bit different from love in that it’s more intense,” he says. “It’s prolonged. It feels like you’re constantly reaching for more. Like, you deeply care about a person and you want them to know how much you care about them.”
Across social media today, the conversation around yearning—the action of showing an extreme passion for someone you want romantically—is having a moment. From Reddit and X to Bluesky and YouTube, be it discussions around AI or pop culture events like the hit reality dating show Love Island USA, yearners are making their intentions known, with some even christening 2025 “Yearner girl summer.” According to Keywords Everywhere, a Google analytics tool, and social listening platforms Brandwatch and YouScan, interest around the topic has increased 102 percent in search volume and 67 percent in social conversation over the past two years.
For anyone wanting to get in on the trend, you too, can learn the art of the yearn, romance author Vanessa Green urges in a recent TikTok. “Noticing the small things is very tried and true,” she says in the video, “Whether that be a cup of coffee shows up on their desk, exactly the way they like it. Or it could be noticing their annoyances and planning ahead for those things.”
Yearners’ presence can also increasingly be felt on dating apps, where there appear to be more people responding to messages quickly and earnestly.
Alexander, who identifies as heterosexual, has always worn the badge proudly—at times to his own detriment. “I’m single now because I’m a recovering yearner,” he says in a TikTok from July, with a caption that reads, “I yearned [too] close to the sun (an avoidant),” referencing his former fiance’s relationship attachment style, which is known for being emotionally distant. “And I know if I get back into some shit right now, I’m back on the yearn. I’m hitting it again.”
“Wow. I’ve found my people,” one user commented.
“I’m convinced that yearning [for] an avoidant is a cannon event. It happens to the best of us,” another wrote.
Alexander believes the trend has caught on in such a way, especially among young men, because perceptions around masculinity are changing. “Especially online,” he says. “There are a lot more men who are able to be open and expressive about the fact that they’re in tune with their emotions.” A paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences last year by Cambridge University Press, which pulled from more than 50 studies of heterosexual relationships, found that romantic relationships are more important to men than previously believed.
Yearning is also slowly translating over to dating apps, an industry that is desperate for signs of new life. While many young people appear to be scared of being seen as “cringe” on the apps, dating companies are attempting to reprioritize their userbase by creating genuine and intentional interactions for singles. A Hinge spokesperson tells WIRED that the company has been following the current online conversations around yearning closely. It led the company, in April, to conduct a study—in which they polled 3,000 global users, both LGBTQIA+ and heterosexual daters—on communication habits, with 44 percent of Hinge daters saying the most attractive part of a follow-up message is “expressing general enthusiasm or interest in the person.”
This comes as people are getting increasingly frustrated with the apps, and the companies behind them are shrinking. Both Match Group and Bumble announced layoffs in recent months. The dating business is at an “inflection point,” Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said to her staff at the time, CBS News reported.
Last September, following an account WIRED published about a notorious Hinge power user who went on 200 dates, the company introduced Your Turn Limits, a feature that required users with eight or more connections waiting on their response to take action before making new ones. According to Hinge, 48 percent of users who tried the feature during a testing phase said that it helped to facilitate quality over quantity dating.
Tinder rolled out its newest feature, Double Date, which pairs you and your date with other matched pairs, in June. The company says it has already shown improvements in communication habits between users. Early testing showed that users in Double Date chats sent 35 percent more messages than in one-on-one chats and women were three times more likely to pair than they were with individual profiles, in addition to overall match rates increasing. Nearly 90 percent of the users are under 29, the company confirmed, perhaps suggesting that Gen Z is slowly returning to the apps.
“If this yearning trend is about genuinely opening oneself up to intimacy—even during the early stages of relationship initiation—I’d be hopeful that some of ongoing trends related to disconnection could turn around,” says Paul Eastwick, a social psychologist at UC Davis who studies attraction and close relationships, and author of the forthcoming book Bonded by Evolution.
Following his breakup, Alexander joined Tinder and BLK, an app for Black singles, but hasn’t had much luck so far. But he has noticed that a lot of women he’s interacted with are over “the lack of emotional reciprocation” from men, he says. It’s why he wants to continue to give a voice to yearners—new and old—on TikTok, until his special person comes along. “People are done with avoidant behavior. People are done with nonchalant attitudes. It's cool to show that you care,” he says. “The lamest thing you can do is care and pretend you don’t.”
