Lately, my social media feed has been flooded with content from other younger women asking one question: Why don’t men yearn anymore?
A staple of the discourse surrounding “yearning” has included scenes from films like “The Notebook,” “Little Women” and “Pride and Prejudice.” Why are the love scenes from this media considered yearning? What exactly is yearning? Why are we concerned with men supposedly not doing that anymore?
Mr. Darcy, played by Matthew Macfadyen, is a good example of yearning in film. Mr. Darcy’s yearning is often expressed through awkward pauses, visible discomfort and constraint concerning his feelings for Elizabeth Bennet, played by Keira Knightley.
This is consistent with the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of yearning: “a strong feeling of wishing for something, especially something that you cannot have or get easily.” Given this concept, the “Pride and Prejudice” storyline fits quite well. This is what people seem to want — a desire with articulation and longing.
What about yearning in music? One of the main men soaking up chart space right now is Alex Warren, whose popularity exploded in 2025. He received a Best New Artist nomination at the Grammy Awards and has almost 20 million TikTok followers.
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“Ordinary,” Warren’s most popular single with nearly 1.5 billion streams on Spotify, is not a uniquely bad song, nor is Warren an insincere artist. The song is a testament to how yearning is currently being produced in mainstream pop music: a low-risk sentiment performed for people.
The song is made to be stadium-level huge, and you can hear that in the big instrumentals and the booming chorus. The stadium-level highs with the writing lows really hit on something huge about this song. It has so much intensity to make up for the lack of depth.
Warren has this lyric in “Ordinary” about making the mundane into a masterpiece. He never explores a theme of mundanity. He mentions no type of routine or friction — it just ends up being all these poetic ideals that affirms the person he is singing about.
We never are let in on what is so amazing about his muse, only that his muse is simply amazing. Why they might turn the mundane into a masterpiece, we are not told. All that is revealed through “Ordinary” is that he yearns for the ideal of that relationship rather than the genuine relationship at hand.
The yearning that Darcy did for Bennet was to sit there and really articulate his feelings. This was shown through the discomfort of what his feelings were making him do in social interactions. Songs like “Ordinary” and Darcy’s plot line are diametrically opposed.
In the same vein, country singer Morgan Wallen does similar things to Warren. His “I’m The Problem” record was the second biggest album this year, with its title track “I’m The Problem” at No. 13 on the top 100.
Wallen is performing a different type of yearning. He longs for this broken relationship and outlines all the ways he tries to heal himself post that relationship. He is restraining himself in that he knows he can’t get back into that relationship.
He’s not a wife guy like Warren; instead, he plays these odd roles of heartache and longing. His song “Just In Case” continues to follow this narrative that despite all the hookups, he continues to hope for a former partner to return to him. These intense desires and emotional vulnerability sell incredibly well, as “Just In Case” has over 276 million streams on Spotify.
Another artist that is chart-dominating is Benson Boone. Boone’s hit song “Beautiful Things” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, where it stayed for 89 weeks. If you have TikTok, you have heard this song.
“Beautiful Things” soars in its chorus. It’s an anxious type of yearning, fearing for the loss of a new love. Boone is performing in a very vulnerable way. In comparison to Wallen’s “Just in Case,” Boone is clearly pleading for something deeper, while Wallen yearns for redemption.
Under the “Ordinary” audio on TikTok, people try to add depth to Warren’s lyrics by mouthing them very passionately at the camera. These songs offer a presence that’s so undeniable on social media. The top three “Ordinary” sounds on TikTok total around 3.8 million videos using that sound.
One major difference between the yearning these songs give to their audience and Darcy is that Darcy is precise and earnest about his feelings. These pop hits tend to fall flat because they are performing for such widespread audiences. That type of deep, thoughtful yearning that they use feels overindulgent and not performing any restraint or calculation like Darcy.
These three songs all do this odd type of yearning. It’s restraint and articulation like Darcy did for Bennet — but they all overindulge. The over-affirmation of the partner might be selling, but it certainly is not something to be striving for in relationships. A fixation on one person and longing for them can look like emotional intimacy, but it really is not.
A fixation in a romantic relationship is an unhealthy obsession with the person you are involved with. It can tend to stem from an insecure bond with the person. These 3-chart juggernaut perform a lot of unhealthy fixation on their muses in these songs.
Warren’s sloppy love poetry in “Ordinary” just affirms the person, and he says nice things with no explanation. The lack of being able to get to something profound with that church-like highs of a song is proof it just fixates on the poetic ideals of the relationship, rather than the actual relationship.
Wallen’s “Just In Case” reminisces on an old relationship continuing with that desire. His fixation lies in where he cannot get over this relationship. “Beautiful Things” by Boone also performs this fixation, using it as a source of his anxiety.
Emotional intimacy is where you feel open and vulnerable with a person without judgement. It involves that emotional articulation and opening up process that Darcy gave to Bennet, which is healthy, but does not involve this overindulgence over one person that becomes problematic very quickly.
These songs do not represent emotional intimacy because they really prioritize that big ideal of being a thoughtful yearning man but do not deliver on it at all.
They offer their audience intensity, like Warren’s poetic ideals without an ounce of specificity just make the song very vague affirmations. Or Wallen’s fixation on not being able to move beyond an ex shows how little emotional maturity is really there. Boone’s piece is most self-aware in his anxious longing, but for a love song, it lacks the being vulnerable with the partner part. He is just vulnerable with his audience.
What we ought to seek in relationships should be beyond poetic ideals like Warren’s “Ordinary,” desire like Wallen’s “Just In Case,” or big feelings like Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” but someone who shows up, listens, remembers and remains. Being affirmed or desired can be truly intoxicating, but that is not the same as being supported.
The problem is not that men aren’t yearning anymore; it’s that men have learned to utilize their version of yearning, and the public willingly consumes it.
Mary-Audrey is a freshman in LAS.
