In Defence of Yearning

Editorial Assistance Navdha Thakkar lingers on the magnitude of love and yearning through the lens of Bollywood films and her favourite romantic melodies.

There is a moment, and if you have loved someone you know the one, where the ordinary world becomes unbearable with meaning. A particular song comes on, and you have to sit down. You catch a scent in the air, cologne or rain or something baking, and you are somewhere else entirely. Flooded. Undone. Surprised by the sheer volume of what you feel. Nobody prepares you for this. Nobody tells you that loving someone is essentially agreeing to be ambushed, for the rest of your life, by small things. 

Love does not announce itself cleanly. It doesn't arrive with a speech. It seeps in through the borrowed hoodie you forgot to return, through the inside joke that has become its own private language, through the specific and unforgettable way they say your name when they are genuinely happy to see you. You don’t notice it building. You think you are spending time with someone. Then one day, the evidence is everywhere, you are standing in the middle of it, completely surrounded, and you realise: this is it. This is what every song, every book, every film was about. 

I grew up watching Bollywood films, which is to say I grew up understanding, on a cellular level, that love is enormous, that it warrants the mountains. That it warrants rain and a whole orchestra and a chest so full the only way to empty it is to sing. There is a reason those films gave every feeling a melody. Some emotions are simply too large for ordinary language. When Shah Rukh Khan spreads his arms open on a hilltop at sunset, it reads as ridiculous to some people. To me, it reads as honest. That is what loving someone actually feels like on the inside. Like you could stretch your arms wide enough to hold the whole sky, and it still wouldn’t be enough room for it. 

Our world now tends to be more guarded about this. We glamorise the longing but shrink from the declaration. We write beautiful, devastating songs about wanting someone across a room and pretend we are too cool to cry at them. But crying is the point. The devastation is the point. The greatest love songs, whether it is Jeff Buckley making the air ache, or Taylor Swift writing about a burning house, or some half-forgotten melody that makes your grandmother go quiet, are not about happiness. They are about the weight of caring for something; the unbearable tenderness of having found something that matters. 

Because here is what nobody tells you about yearning: it is not an absence. It does not feel like nothing; it feels like everything, concentrated. It feels like standing at a window at golden hour, thinking about someone’s hands. It feels like rereading a conversation just to hear their voice in your head again. It is an act of devotion so complete and so private that you could not explain it to anyone outside of it. And yet every poet who has ever lived has tried, because some feelings demand to be witnessed even when they cannot be shared. 

And then there is the residue. The inventory of a love, which turns out to be far larger than you realised while you were inside it. A restaurant you can’t go back to. A word they used that you now use. The film they made you watch that you now hold like something precious. A notification sound that still, months later, makes your stomach flip before your brain catches up. Love does not leave cleanly. It leaves fingerprints on everything it touches, on your taste in music, on the route you walk home, on the precise way you now take your coffee. You carry these things not as wounds but as proof. Proof that something happened. Proof that you were changed. 

There is a word in Portuguese, saudade, for the love that remains even in the absence of its object. The Japanese call it mono no aware: the bittersweet ache of impermanence, of knowing that this moment, this person, this exact quality of light will not last. The Welsh have hiraeth, a longing for somewhere you cannot return to, or perhaps never fully had. Every culture that has ever loved has felt the need to name this feeling. The ache is not a failure. It is the shape love leaves in you when it has nowhere to go.  

So let it. Let it leave its shape. Let the small things ambush you. The song, the smell, the slant of afternoon light that suddenly has a face attached to it. Let yourself sit in the feeling without rushing to the other side of it. Because that weight in your chest, that breathless, ridiculous, overwhelming thing, is not a problem to be solved; that is the whole point. That is you, fully alive, paying attention to something beautiful and slowly understanding that to yearn is to have loved; and what a privilege that is. 

by Navdha Thakkar