Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

We aren’t all reading the same “Wuthering Heights”

The renewed hype around Brontë's book highlights Gen Z's embrace of a safer kind of obsessive romance

Published February 21, 2026 12:00PM (EST)

A version of this story first appeared in The Swell, Salon's culture newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this, for more culture that's made to last.

Just to get us all up to speed on what’s happening with The Youth: The social trend most associated with Gen Z is declining to date, and instead dedicating themselves to romantic yearning. Yearning is their common language; they yearn alone and they yearn together. The diffidence and unwillingness to risk putting themselves out there that older generations have already ascribed to them means that their desire to yearn is liable to be both ridiculed and catastrophized (will no one think about the birth rates?). Pop-psychology dispatches with ominous titles like “Gen Zers who romanticize yearning will likely learn these 5 things the hard way” suggest that there is perhaps too much yearning going on.

Hypotheses and presumed explanations mention the hyperconnectedness of their lives but also the gap created by both the COVID lockdown and the subsequent, lasting association of physical closeness and danger. But writing by actual members of this cohort suggests that embracing yearning is actually a healthy way to create space between who they are now and who they intend to be . . . you know, at some point. “In a landscape where dating apps encourage efficiency and optionality, longing becomes a way of resisting closure,” writes one, adding that yearning “allows........

© Salon