Gen Z and Men Who Yearn 

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn. 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes. 

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?  

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.  

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.  

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.  

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.  

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones. Mr. Darcy overcomes his personal resentment toward Mr. Wickham and ensures that he marries Lydia Bennet for the sake of maintaining the good name of the Bennet family, even though he has no concrete hope that Elizabeth Bennet will ever marry him. Conrad Fisher spends half of season three of The Summer I Turned Pretty fixing his late mother’s house so that the girl he loves can get married there to someone else, with no expectation that she will ever love him back. Steve Harrington continues to help and protect Nancy Wheeler for the entirety of Stranger Things even though they only date until mid-season two. He becomes the “babysitter” for the younger characters in the show, expresses a desire to have a big family (six kids to be exact), and becomes a football coach at his old high school at the end of the series. 

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.  

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?  

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.  

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.  

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.   

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage. 

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.  

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy. 

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.  

How is any of this related to the internet trend of male yearning, you may ask? I think when we look at the desires women express online (i.e., for reliable men who perform acts of service and commit to relationships) and compare it to the statistical evidence showing that those desires are not being met (i.e., women are not getting married), the emerging picture is pretty clear. Young women are often mocked for fawning over fictional characters, but rather than mocking, we should ask what we can do to help them develop these desires in a healthy way. It is painfully obvious to me that they are doing what we zoomers unfortunately do best: living out on the internet the same fictions we don’t experience in real life.  

I’m not sure whether, on the whole, millennial women can be rescued from their warped vision of relationships and sexuality. They’ve been exposed to the damaging effects of the Sexual Revolution too consistently and for too long. But we have an opportunity to do better by Gen Z. They’re disillusioned with modern dating, but the characters that capture their imaginations suggest that they’re still interested in marriage and children. They don’t interact with their male counterparts, but their interest in “male yearning” tells us that they’re still reaching for a healthy model of masculinity.  

It’s difficult, of course, to know how to turn this desire into real life marriages. The first step is to acknowledge the desire itself as good. Even more important is to create opportunities for young people to meet, and that starts with an attitude of hospitality. Inviting single friends over to one’s house requires only a little effort, but it can be the difference whether two young people meet or not.  

A personal anecdote illustrates how this can play out in real life. While living in Canada during the COVID pandemic, my husband and I organized a reading group for the duration of one academic year at the University of Toronto. I baked each week, which allowed us to take our masks off to eat and speak with greater ease. Over the course of those brief months, we all got to know each other well. Two couples met through our discussions. Less than four years on. one couple is engaged; the other is married with a baby. All it took was the decision to volunteer a few hours each week to bring young people together in the same room.  

The way young women communicate on the internet may seem strange, silly, even cringeworthy. But instead of shaming or ridiculing them, we should pay attention. It’s our collective duty to notice what kind of storytelling speaks to them. And it’s our responsibility to make it possible for them to get off the internet and meet men who yearn in real life.  

Image by FlixPix and licensed via Alamy. Image resized.