The Art of Yearning

Yearning is perhaps one of the quietest forms of suffering one could endure. It doesn't necessarily arrive with tears of desperate cries. It lives within your heart, in the pauses before someone says a name, in the empty space beside you; where you wish they were sitting. To yearn is to desire something with such depth that its absence becomes a presence of its own. It is to carry someone within you even when they no longer walk beside you, to live in the distant idea of what is and what you wish could be.

The yearner is a peculiar kind of person. They are neither entirely hopeful nor entirely hopeless for they exist somewhere between the two. They remain suspended in the possibility of a future that may never arrive. A yearner remembers everything, even the smallest of gestures, particular laughs, a glance that lasted only a moment to somehow becoming permanent. While the world around them moves forward, a yearner often remained attached to a moment that the other person may have already forgotten.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's White Nights captures this form of person with extraordinary tenderness. Its unnamed Dreamer is almost the perfect embodiment of the yearner: someone who has lived more in their imagination than in ordinary life, who longs for connection before he has even found someone to connect with. When he meets Nastenka, four nights of conversation are enough for him to pour his entire emotional world into the possibility of loving her; and her him.

What makes the story so painful for someone in his position is that Dreamer's love becomes real to him long before it becomes a shared reality between them. He listens to Nastenka's story, comforts her and gradually falls in love with her. For a brief moment, it appears possible that his loneliness might finally end. There is even a moment when Nastenka appears to choose him. Until her past returns in the form of her former lover, who she runs back towards. And the Dreamer is left behind.

There is no great betrayal. Nastenka does not deliberately set out to destroy him. She simply rediscovered the person she had been waiting for to have returned, and it is there that both the Dreamer and the reader discover that being loved for a moment is not the same as being chosen forver.

Perhaps one of the cruelties of yearning: sometimes another person's happiness requires your heartbreak. Yet, Dostoevsky does something remarkable with Dreamer's pain. He does not make the love meaningless merely because it ends. The Dreamer looks back on those four nights as something precious. His life was briefly illuminated by another human being even if that person did not ultimately remain in it.

This idea, that love can be genuine even when it does not become a relationship is a central aspect to the experience of yearning.

The yearner does not merely desire a person, they desire a future. This distinction becomes devastating in Ian McEwan's Atonement.

Briony Tallis's accusation against Robbie Turner creates a chain of consequences that tears Robbie and Cecilia apart. However, unlike the Dreamer and Nastenka, Robbie and Cecilia genuinely love one another. Their separation is not caused by a lack of affection but by a catastrophic misunderstanding, their social circumstances and the consequences that follow from Briony's false interpretation of what she witnessed.

Their love therefore belongs to an even more painful category: shared love that might have worked. There is something uniquely agonizing about a relationship destroyed, not from incompatibility but life's own interventions between them.

Robbie and Cecilia are separated just as they are beginning to imagine a shared future; their lives are divided by war, imprisonment, distance. Robbie carries the hope of returning to Cecilia while she builds her life around the possibility of his return.

It however only gets worse, with the ending revealing how the reunion we have been allowed to imagine is not real. The possibility of their reunion exists only in Briony's reconstruction of the story. She cannot undo what she did, their lost year and the life that was taken from them. So she gives the next best thing within her capabilities. An ending that reality denied them, within the pages of her fiction.

Making her one of the most devastating forms of a yearner even among Robbie and Cecilia; yearning not only for a person but for a version of history that never happened.

Briony's imagined reunion becomes an attempt to repair the irreparable. Fiction becomes the place where the lovers can finally receive what reality refused them but the readers are left knowing that imagination cannot resurrect the dead or return lost time.

The same ache appears in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, although in a quieter and restrained form. Stevens and Miss Kenton spend years in close proximity, and there is a deep emotional connection between them, but Stevens continually suppresses his feelings beneath his devotion to his professional role. By the time he begins to confront his feelings, much of the opportunity is long gone.

This yearning, it doesn't derive from a dramatic external catastrophe but by hesitation.

There are loves destroyed by war, families, distance and accident. And then there's love that disappears because two people are afraid, too restrained or too hesitant to speak their mind. That kind of loss can be specially haunting because the question of "What If I Had something?" has no real answers.

We often assume that moving on means forgetting, sometimes it means carrying a person in a quieter form then you imagined.

This is also why Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love feels so deeply connected the idea of yearning. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan grow close after discovering that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Yet they deliberately refuse to become what hurt them. Their love remains largely contained within shared glances, conversations and largely within silences.

They are close enough to understand each other and distant enough to remain strangers. Their feelings are obvious to an audience but rarely is it ever expressed directly. The space between them is far more important than a declaration.

What is not said can become more powerful than what is.

A person may spend years remembering a conversation that lasted only for five minutes. They may remember a hand that almost touched theirs, a goodbye that lasted too long. A look that meant to convey their entire confession.

The yearner lives inside these fragments. And that is why unrequited love can become so consuming. Reality provides very little, and therefore imagination fills in the gaps. When you cannot have the person, you begin to construct the version of them that lives in your mind. You remember their kindness and forget their flaws. You replay conversations and imagine different responses; create alternate endings. This person becomes partly real and partly imagined; unsure how much of each.

Maybe for these reasons, unrequited love can feel larger than mutual love. The latter exists in reality, where it must contend with ordinary things: disagreements, habits, responsibilities, boredom, misunderstandings. Unrequited love does not have to survive those. It survives within imagination, where the beloved can remain eternally beautiful and within their pedestal; where the relationship remains eternally unfinished.

An unfinished story is difficult to kill. There is always another possibility.

In The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's yearning for Daisy isn't simply his desire for a person; but an extension of his desire for the lost future. He believes that recovering her will somehow allows him to recover his past. He wants to return to a moment that no longer exists. But time does not move backward. Sometimes what we want is impossible not because the person is unreachable, but the moment we want them from is longer attainable.

You cannot return to the summer you first met someone, can't repeat your conversations before the argument, and can't become the person you were before you lost them. All you can do is remember. And this memory, it is both merciful and cruel. Preserving what time destroyed but also preventing the past from entirely remaining as your past.

This is why two lovers who cannot be together may continue to haunt one another long after they have physically separated. Perhaps they met at the wrong time, distance separates them or their familial responsibilities, social expectations, or circumstances made a shared life impossible. Perhaps one must leave while other stays. Or worse, when both are already bound to lives they cannot abandon.

Fate is complicated and indifferent to what the heart wants. There are no villains in such stories and may be the hardest part.

When the hurt is deliberate, anger can become a form of escape. You can blame them, can call them selfish or cruel and attempt to close the door. But what are you supposed to do with a love destroyed by circumstances?

There is no satisfying answer.

And Perhaps this is what makes these stories so enduring. They reflect something that happy love stories cannot do: the uncomfortable truth that love does not dare guarantee possession.

You often hear of stories of love as though love's ultimate purpose is union. Two people meet, fall in love, overcome obstacles, and finally find each other. But not all love stories end at the moment of reunion.

Some end in separation, some with a goodbye neither parties wished to say, some with the other waiting while in some they arrive too late or never again speak at all. Worst of all, some continue long after the relationship has ended, living quietly in memory.

The yearner is therefore not simply someone who wants what they cannot have. They are someone who is suspended between reality and possibility. They live with two versions of life: one that happened and one that might have happened.

This second life can be almost as vivid as the first one. You imagine the apartments they might have shared, the mornings they might have woken beside each other. The children they might have raised or the ordinary evenings that never came to exist.

You do not only mourn what happened, but also everything that never had the chance to happen.

There is a very unsettling kind of grief reserves for such futures. It has no photographs, no shared anniversaries, no physical history to point toward. Yet it can be enormous because the mind is capable of grieving possibilities almost as intensely as memories.

And sometimes the possibility itself becomes the object of love.

The yearner eventually might even understand that the person they have been holding onto is partly the person they knew and partly the person they imagined. That they have spent years loving not only someone, but an alternate life, an alternate route of happiness they wished they had.

Acceptance, then, does not necessarily translate to declaring that kind of love as foolish. It however entails separating love from possession.

There is a strange dignity in accepting what you love and wanted a life with, but acknowledging that it did not happen and your love wasn't false.

Love does not become meaningless simply because it reached an ending. A person does not become insignificant simply from their departure. A story retains its worth even if it remains unfinished. Some people enter our lives not to remain there, but to change the shape of the person we become afterward.

The Dreamer in White Nights is still lonely when Nastenka leaves him, but he is no longer the same person who met her. Briony spends her life trying to reason with the consequences of her action, and through fiction, creates the reunion that reality denied Robbie and Cecilia. Mia and Sebastian continue into their separate lives carrying something of what they once gave each other. The characters of these stories are marked by what they could not keep.

That is The Yearner.

There will be nights when memories return without seeking them, songs that sounded like particular people. Places that feel sacred because they stood their once. There will be moments when the yearner wonders whether the other person ever thinks of them.

And sometimes, they do.

This belief, perhaps it is the smallest comfort available to those separated by circumstance; that somewhere in another life or another place, they remember them too.

Eventually, yearning must learn to coexist with acceptance. A beautiful thing is beautiful even if it did not last. Recognize that not every person you shall come to love is to remain beside you forever.

Some people remain with us differently, some as memories, some as lessons. Becoming quite ache that visits when we hear an old song or pass a familiar place. They become the person you imagined growing old with even if life chose another path for you.

With it being both the final tragedy and the final beauty of yearning.

We spend so much of our lives believing that love is about possession: to have, to keep and to be together. But in it's most visceral form, love is the act of genuine devotion towards something, no matter the duration of it all.

The yearner eventually learns that the heart can survive an unfinished story.

You may never stop remembering completely, you may even wonder what it all could have been. But with time, that wound becomes less like a blood spilling void of pain and more a permanent reminder of a memory you treasure. One that hurt you terribly once, but also something that mattered enormously to that version of you.

Accepting your reality is hard, the genuine rejection gives the heart an answer. But impossible love gives it a question.

And a question can live far longer than an answer; perhaps even forever.