Can short people date? Part 2
Yes, height is a big deal in a partner. Apps aren't helping.
“Altezza mezza bellezza”
Half of beauty is height - Italian proverb
I entered - albeit briefly - my first proper relationship at university, while studying in the gorgeous Tyneside city of Durham.
Out the other side, moving to the big smoke of London, presented with a whole new world of potential romantic interests - unlike in Durham, where everyone knows everyone to an unseemly degree - I decided to try out this dating app you might have heard of: Tinder.
At the time, it was fresh on the scene. In a matter of days, it was plain to see that it wasn’t built for people like me who showed the apparently Victorian levels of chaste required to not reveal their phallus online.
I needed something a bit more serious, a bit more refined, I told myself. As someone who enjoys in-person interaction and always assumed I would find a partner in the course of my regular social life, it was much to my chagrin that I found myself resorting to Match.com - a website I had previously assumed had a client base whose average age was simply ‘retired’.
I started constructing my profile. Age. Occupation. Religion. Hobbies.
Now height. Lower. No, lower still. Match.com, it transpired, wasn’t built for me either because, at the time, the minimum height you could select, as a man, was 5’5’’. I’m not sure if that’s still the case - I no longer have the need nor inclination to find out.
What I do know is that it certainly put a downer on my efforts to find love for a while. I could only conclude my stature was so extreme that the developers of the most popular dating site in the entire world were not capable of conceiving someone of my ilk even trying to find a partner.
It added weight to my pre-existing belief that the line between confident and creepy when it came approaching a woman is 5’9’’ - a view I now realise is overly-reductive but, particularly through those teenage years where romantic urges are first formed, it was clear that my height wasn’t exactly standing me in good stead.
Constructing a profile on other dating sites was littered with options that were equally unpalatable, just the same volume of lose-lose choices with regard to my height. Some apps carried prominent articles with titles like “Why do women all seem to want taller men?” - a red flag at worst, a sub-optimal piece of content marketing to any man of below average height at best.
The most germane question to my personal quest became: do I disclose my height right at the top of my profile, and risk getting (far) fewer matches, or do I wait to reveal it later on? If so, do I bring it up before arranging a date, and risk people pulling out before they even meet me in person? Or do I not reference my height at all until our real life encounter, and risk seeing an understandably crestfallen face when they do lock eyes on me?
While I couldn’t take disappointment for granted, I imagined the date would be surprised, and not in a pleasant way, to be presented with someone quite so small in real life. People read 5’2’’ on a profile and still assume I would be bigger, I’ve been told.
Alternatively, I’ve been told that I don’t look 5’2’’ when I tell people that genuinely is my measurement, and they would have assumed I was, say, 5’5’’, if they had to judge my physical appearance in person.
Either way, that’s a lot of calculations going through anyone’s mind while they’re trying to decide whether they want to split a bottle of red or white, or who picks up the tab at the end of the evening. It was a big decision; studies by the likes of Pawlowski and Koziel suggest that taller men receive more replies to dating announcements, and have more girlfriends who are perceived as more physically attractive and have higher reproductive success.
I am not the only one who has noticed the challenging height dynamics surrounding modern dating. I was once at a dinner party with a friend of mine who had found themselves newly single. They began complaining about the number of profiles on dating sites from women claiming to only want partners who were 6’ and over, or in no uncertain terms clarified that “if you’re not tall, you need not apply”.
He is 5’11’’. He was still made to feel insecure about his stature. In conversations with women, he rounds up to 5’11’’ and a half, he explained, before realising who he was sitting across the table from and delivering a ham-fisted apology over how ridiculous his predicament must appear to 5’2’’ me of all people.
The women at our dinner party, in a show of rather endearing solidarity, seemed genuinely appalled that fellow members of their sex would be so brazen about their physical requirements from a partner in a public forum. The general feeling was that though these individuals may well prefer to date someone slightly taller, the rudeness and coldness with which they rejected those who were still themselves above average height did not justify the benefits of streamlining their process by screening candidates so brutally.
“Hang on, they actually put that in their profiles?” was the flavour of their reaction. My friends had assumed I was being hyperbolic when I said I had encountered such stipulations on a regular basis. When this was vociferously confirmed by the experiences of my much taller acquaintance, they seemed only too ready to accept this reality and apologise on behalf of womankind.
I was not owed such contrition, nor did I expect it. As ever, I was at pains to illustrate my lack of offence, both to the views some women hold on short men and to my above-average height friend’s frustration at his own apparent shortcomings. If anyone should be making an apology about how our romantic lives are structured, it is us men.
Everyone should be free to pick the partner that suits them best. Tall or short, what business is it of mine to pass an opinion? No one should be forced to actively try and form a romantic bond with shorter men just because some of us feel a little excluded, especially if such a bond is not one that would make them as happy as they could be.
And when it comes to perspective on your own height, your feelings on that issue aren’t any less valid because someone else is in a worse state. If your kitchen is on fire, and your neighbour’s entire house is on fire, your kitchen is still on fire. If you told me you slept in a hedge last night, my immediate question wouldn’t be “yes, but was it a nice hedge?” or to point out the weather was fair, or that you actually enjoy sleeping in hedges more than other people. It would be to sympathise, because kipping in shrubbery is patently suboptimal for anyone.
It all reminded me of a great New Yorker cartoon I saw a couple of years ago. A queue of people are lining up for a theme park ride. The normal height check sign has been replaced with one that reads “you must be this tall to claim to be six feet tall”.
There is comedy, not insult, to be had in exaggerating your height. But you are still going to be envious of those who only have a burning kitchen to deal with, or who enjoyed a hedgeless night’s sleep. More on that next week.