Modern dating culture
Modern dating killed romantic yearning, and now we are grieving a love we buried with our own hands. There is a moment in Voicemails for Isabelle where Wes receives the very first voicemail from Jill, and something quietly shifts. Watching their love unfold, from a first glance to shared laughter to a single held eye contact, felt less like entertainment and more like mourning.
We envied it because we recognised it: a kind of waning we had quietly stopped allowing ourselves. We built a culture of situationships, traded longing for convenience, and now we’re on Netflix, searching for the romantic yearning we engineered out of our own lives.
Yearning is the slow progression of love that is restrained, deliberate, and achingly felt. It is too subtle to be called obsession, and too dignified to be mistaken for desperation.
We have moved past the era of aggressive, possessive love: the kind that was once romanticised on screen. What we want now is the romance of classic films: love that is earned through glances, timing, and restraint. We want someone to long for us, not for the quick validation, but for the slower, harder feeling that actually means something.
The voicemails in Voicemails for Isabelle were not meant to impress but to express. Those voicemails were layered with feeling, unguarded and unhurried, and they made Wes fall harder for Jill with every word. His yearning did not begin the moment he saw her. It began the moment he heard her.
This is the slow burn romance we crave: one that does not ask you to perform, but simply to be. It is the kind of love that stays without suffocating: the same quiet, consuming devotion that made audiences fall apart watching The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Modern dating culture did not just change how we meet people. It changed what we allow ourselves to feel. Dating apps, situationships, and casual relationships taught people to suppress emotion, to stay cool, detached, and deliberately mysterious. In performing indifference, we forgot what it actually feels like to love and to be loved. We built this trap ourselves: where the bare minimum is now expected, and anyone who dares to feel deeply is dismissed as too much.
Now we are searching for something our own habits have made nearly impossible to find. It is why we keep returning to fictional slow-burn romance: not to escape the world we created, but to mourn what we lost in building it. We had that romantic yearning, and we chose to replace
it with something faster, easier, and emptier. Now we have nothing left but to grieve the love we deliberately rejected.
In performing emotional independence, we forgot what it feels like to simply want someone. Perhaps that is all Voicemails for Isabelle and The Summer I Turned Pretty are really offering us: not a love story, but a eulogy for the one we never let ourselves have.
