Do you have to let it linger?

Girl, no

This one is dedicated to all the yearners. The ones who meet a man on a dating app, go on maybe one date, and immediately start building a furnace of delusion. The ones who make eye contact with their campus crush and proceed to analyse it like it was a diplomatic exchange. The ones who, after a terrible and messy breakup, still secretly believe that maybe, just maybe, it will circle back.

Respectfully, this is an intervention for you.

There is a particular kind of longing that feels justified when the connection was good, but the timing was tragic. They’re recently out of a relationship. Or a situationship. Or something “complicated.” They insist they’re over it, yet somehow everything reminds them of their ex. 

You tell yourself you’re being patient. Mature. Emotionally intelligent. Giving them space, so they don’t get overwhelmed and leave you.

Or sometimes it’s that cute unit of an individual in your tutorial whose name you only know because the roll was marked. Armed with their full legal name, you’re suddenly conducting a multi-platform investigation like it’s part of the syllabus. Girl, lock in. They are not going to help you get the HD.

We romanticise yearning as though history hasn’t repeatedly warned us.

Let’s review the archives. Jay Gatsby built an entire mansion to impress the woman in his memories and still died alone in a swimming pool. Romeo knew a girl for approximately twenty-four hours and escalated so aggressively that Shakespeare had to invent a tragedy to humble him. Longing makes great art because it is unresolved. It is aesthetic. It is torture.

It is rarely rewarded with catharsis.

There’s something almost universal about being in love with the idea of love. Not always a person, not always a reality, but the possibility of it. The polished, cinematic version that lives safely in our imagination, untouched by inconvenience or contradiction. We grow up watching love unfold in exaggerated glances and swelling soundtracks, and somewhere along the way, we begin to place ourselves inside those scenes. Even if we insist we are rational, detached, above it all, there is often still a quiet longing shaped by something we once saw on a screen or traced across the pages of a book. And so yearning causes us to linger between the pages, rather than see the person for who they truly are. 

When you yearn for someone who is not fully available, you attach yourself to their uncertainty. You become patient while they remain undecided. You call it “understanding” while quietly hoping they’ll wake up and choose you with cinematic clarity. Meanwhile, you are emotionally invested in someone who is still referencing someone else in their notes. Girl, they’re posting “Sienna” by The Marias, and you genuinely think it’s about you?

Yearning thrives in ambiguity because ambiguity keeps the story alive. As long as it lingers, it hasn’t failed. It hasn’t ended. It remains a possibility. But possibility is not commitment. It is not presence. It is not someone standing in front of you, showing how much they love you.

Here is the elephant in the room: Do you genuinely like thinking of them 24/7, or do you just like how it makes you feel? Are you yearning for them or for the serotonin rush that comes from living in this fantasy?

The truth is that the energy you are spending analysing them could be spent investing in yourself. The time you are dedicating to decoding tone could be redirected towards building the life you want. The depth you are capable of feeling does not have to be reserved for someone who cannot meet you fully.

Yearn for your own growth. Yearn for your peace. Yearn for becoming the most grounded, self-assured, beautifully evolving version of yourself. Yearning for someone else will always feel unstable. 

Yearning for yourself builds something solid.

You can acknowledge that it felt good. You can admit that you hoped for more. But you can also decide that you deserve more than a lingering almost.

Let the artists suffer for their art if they wish to. 

You, however, can choose clarity.

And maybe, for once, let the yearning work in your favour.

Parul Taya is a second-year Civil Engineering student at UNSW who enjoys writing about human connection, culture, and the quiet drama of everyday life.