All the real yearners, come to the front

Lovers Day has just passed — as swiftly as love often comes and goes. For a moment, the world felt lighter. The sun came out, the grey clouds dispersed as though to remind us to let love in when it comes. (Well that’s how the hopeful romantic in me romanticised it anyway.) It feels as good a time as any to speak to the self-professed real yearners.

I’ve been calling myself a real yearner for years without ever interrogating what it actually means to myself or to others. Though undefined, the phrase feels true to my nature. Like most powerful identities, it makes sense, before we even make sense of it.

So what does it mean to be a real yearner?

“No one really knows what it means but, it’s provocative… it gets the people going.” - Chazz Michael Michaels, Blades of Glory

I looked to some of the songs I love to help construct an answer. Let’s get into it, you may need your music library for this one.

A real yearner is not just someone who wants love. That feels too reductive. Many people want love. A real yearner is someone who does not fear the state of wanting. (Perhaps attaining might be the fear but I’ll save that drag for another day.)

A real yearner lives in a space of endless possibilities. To hope is to yearn, to yearn is to hope. We understand loss but remain oriented toward possibility.

When I think about real yearning, I think about Frank Ocean in ‘Thinkin Bout You’ asking:

“Do you not think so far ahead? ’Cause I’ve been thinking ’bout forever.”

As I listened back to this song, I found myself drawn to the spatio-temporal space the lyrics exist in.

He is alone in the present, speaking internally to someone from the past while imagining a shared future. The question cannot reach its recipient. The conversation survives only in his memory and imagination. It defies logic, as love often does.

Yearning in this song collapses chronology. What we know of time and how it moves sequentially from past, present to future is altered.

Frank Ocean, a true yearner, is recalling, experiencing and hoping separately but all at once.

The object of his affection is absent in his reality but everpresent emotionally. Memory here, functions as a living tense. A secret other tense — existing neither here nor there but somewhere, still there and still palpable.

Yearning questions what we think we know about reality; about love.

In ‘Bleeding,’ Cari’s haunting voice moves differently through time. The past and present intertwine:

“If you didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it.

I knew it wasn’t fair.

I betray myself again for love.”

The betrayal she speaks of is both historical and immediate. It happened before and it is happening again, it’s happening in the now. She, the yearner recognises the pattern and yet remains inside it. Much like we all do in recognising our own patterns and internal scripts while still remaining stuck in them.

Msaki and Caiiro offer us another dimension of yearning in the song ‘Chem Trails'.’

Contrails — the white plumes left behind by planes linger after the aircraft has been and gone. They serve as evidence of passage, a metaphorical “I was here.” Much like what it means to yearn.

The relationship may be over, unrealised, or imagined, but emotional residue remains suspended in the air and in time.

“It’s been 48 hours since you’ve been gone…”

She sings from the present while moving through an imagined proximity; feeling someone who is no longer there.

In this song, yearning lives within the emotional aftermath.

She is not with them and yet her inner climate still responds to their absence as if they are still present. “Oceans rising. My forest is burning.” This powerful imagery details how the body still remembers what reality has removed.

Through music and my post-midnight musings, I’ve begun to understand that:

To yearn is to delay grief.

Grief asks us for acceptance; an acknowledgement that something has ended or may never arrive.

Yearning says: not yet but maybe

It keeps the emotional door ajar even when logic insists it has closed. This is not necessarily denial. It’s a negotiation between fantasy and reality grounded in past experiences existing in the realm of possibilities. It’s a “tip on the right rope” – word to Janae Monae. A plea to chance. A gamble. The real yearner knows loss intimately. But somewhere inside them lives a stubborn belief that love could still find its way back, forward, or simply come into being.

Yearning is a kind of grief that still believes in miracles; in the magic of what could be.

To fully grieve would mean accepting that the love you seek may never come. And the real yearner, defiantly refuses to sign that agreement.

We need real yearners

We need real yearners because they remind us of the importance of desire. For better or worse, the state of wanting, is what keeps us evolving as human beings. What still pushes us towards one another in a world predicated on individualism.

Real yearners remind us that love is not only valid when reciprocated, completed, or permanent. That connections exist outside labels, timelines, or outcomes.

That love can be fleeting or lifelong. Imagined or unfinished. Mutual or unrequited.

But does that make it any less real? The real yearner says it doesn’t, it’s still real.

As Rihanna once told us, we find love in hopeless places and the yearner is the person willing to hold fast to dreams.

To be a real yearner is to live outside of linearity.

Yearning is an identity of faith. Faith in possibilities. You remain open even without certainty. Sometimes, you hope and you wait. And other times you let go. Real yearners do it for the love of the game!

Forever yearner!