Gentle readers, it’s time to hike up your petticoats, reach for your favourite vibrator, and settle in for season four of Bridgerton. Because let’s finally admit it: we are deeply, unashamedly hot for Regency romance.

From The Buccaneers to Bridgerton, 100 Nights of Hero to “Wuthering Heights”, period dramas are having a serious moment. Whether it’s the painfully restrained small talk, the simmering tension, or the many, many layers that must be removed, we simply can’t get enough of a corseted love story.

Maybe it’s the fact that everyone’s dating IRL, at balls and chaperoned walks, rather than over a screen. That men are baring their souls in heart‑shattering monologues, declaring they “burn” for us, instead of sending a text about how they’re “too busy with fantasy football to date right now.”

But does that passion end when the credits roll, or are we carrying it into our own romantic lives? Has the rise of Regency romance started to influence how we date, flirt, and fall in love? Because honestly, if I receive one more “U up?” text, I may consign myself to spinsterhood and take up embroidery immediately.

Why are we so hot for Regency romance?

At its core, Regency romances are the opposite of what we’re “supposed” to find sexy. Very little skin is bared — although those push-up bras and empire necklines are doing the Lord’s work — and touching is generally off-limits. Obviously, shows like Bridgerton and The Buccaneers do include some pre-marital coitus, because let’s be honest, they’ve got hours of showtime and a very horny audience to please.

But at their core, shouldn’t we be craving romances with less fabric and more than the occasional graze of a hand? Nah, bestie.

“Regency romances tend to centre on an aspirational version of love and partnership that many feel is missing from today’s dating world,” explains Emma Hathorn, Seeking’s Relationship Expert. “The rituals of traditional courtship, whilst typically fraught with classism and other societal divides, frame romantic desire through a language of devotion, yearning and emotional intensity, which is undoubtedly appealing both in the literary context and in real life.”

There’s no doubt that 2025 was the Year of Yearning, most notably through Conrad in The Summer I Turned Pretty — a very non-Regency romance. But the thought still holds: we love caught gazes and the brush of fingers over actual heavy petting. We’ve all had someone drunkenly fumble while searching for the clit, we’ve all been made to feel like just a body and nothing more. What we really want is to be a soul existing in a body, a soul caught by someone else’s.

“Narratives such as Bridgerton and Wuthering Heights ultimately allow us to maintain the belief that true love will win over adversity with its transformative power,” continues Hathorn.

As someone who has clung to exes far longer than I should’ve, I get it. I get the urge to believe in the love story — even if our hurdles are his avoidant attachment style and fear of commitment, and not classism, WW1 or a betrothal to a foreign prince. Call it Sunk Cost Fallacy, call it delusion, but we all want to believe it’ll be worth it in the end, that the nights spent crying on the bathroom floor will be omitted from the love story we recount to our great-grandkids.

“We want to put the ‘main character’ energy back into the romantic quest for our users, moving away from passive, disengaged dating,” Hathorn explains.