Do taller people have more partners?
Diving into the data on whether more inches matter
A 2015 study by Chapman University, suggested that how many sexual partners people have is linked to their height (and body mass).
When looking at the average number of partners across a mammoth sample of 60,058 heterosexual men and women, the researchers found that, on average, men who were average to extremely tall reported one to three more partners than men who were below average in height.
However, they noted that other findings “did not fall neatly in line with evolutionary or sociocultural theories” - i.e. that while the shortest men were underrepresented, there wasn’t a curve linking additional partners with extra height when you continued getting taller and taller.
“The expectation that tall men, for example, would have the most sex partners was only partially supported. In fact, there was little difference in number of sex partners across the height continuum, with one exception - only very short men reported notably fewer median sex partners (five) than men of other heights (seven)…”
While we may have suspected that continually increasing height wouldn’t continually increase sexual appeal, this also hints at another conclusion; it might not be the absolute height that matters as much as the difference in height in potential couples.
The authors add: “Research has repeatedly shown that women prefer men who are relatively taller than they are. It is possible that for most women there is a certain minimal threshold of height, after which they will consider a male as a potential sex partner, and thus men above that height will end up with similar numbers of sex partners."
That minimal threshold theory sounds very much plausible to my ears. From my anecdotal experience, the defence of “I don’t mind how short my boyfriend is” tends to rapidly fall apart when you ask what would happen if they were, say, 4’5’’ tall, and that the threshold for a man women would theoretically want to date varies significantly by how tall the woman in question is.
An interesting side note from the study - very short women reported fewer sexual partners compared with tall women. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine similar thoughts of thresholds could work in the opposite direction too, and for both sexes, that men and women find too much of an upward or downward gap off-putting? That a man would implicitly acknowledge that above, say 5’11’’, a potential girlfriend becomes less appealing to them?
The relative difference in the height of the two partners in a relationship appears to be key, across a variety of studies, both old and new. Way back in the 1980s, a study looked at 720 couples, and found only one in which the woman was taller than the man. Fast forward to 2013, and data from more than 12,500 relationships in the UK found the man was taller than the woman in 92.5 per cent of couples, and fewer than 4 per cent of couples stood at equal heights.
There was some 5.6’’ separating the couples, on average. Taking a different sample from the United States, and dating back further, to the mid 1980s, and the proportion of men taller than their spouses again comes in around the 92 per cent mark.
You might immediately reply that men are taller than women on average, so this is all just par for the course. But the tendency for height differences to exist, and their scale, is far greater than would be implied if the results were based on couples coming together by chance.
As an excellent post from the Guardian’s US data editor Mona Chalabi on statistics website FiveThirtyEight explains: “Is it really so surprising that only 7.5 per cent of heterosexual couples don’t include a man who is taller than a woman? Yes, it is. Dutch researchers checked this by seeing what would happen if they assigned couples together at random. If choice were out of their hands, 10.2 per cent of heterosexual couples would have a man either the same height or shorter than the woman — the reality is 26 percent lower than that.”
We can also discern a clear height preference, particularly on the part of women. As Chalabi reports, in a 2014 study published in the Journal of Family Issues, “the authors looked at 925 personal ads of individuals in the US seeking heterosexual relationships posted on Yahoo (they used data from the General Social Survey to weight those ads and make sure they were nationally representative in terms of age, geography, race, income, etc.).
“The study found that women’s height preferences are far stronger than men’s. Forty-nine per cent of women only wanted to date men who were taller than they were, whereas only 13.5 percent of men only wanted to date women shorter than they were. By contrast, only 1.7 percent of women said they would only date a shorter man — a conveniently similar figure to the 1.3 percent of men who say they would only date a taller woman.”
Relative or absolute, female height preferences are arguably traced back to our evolutionary beginnings as hunter gatherers. Capturing prey and not dying at the hands of sabre tooth tigers were pretty much the only things that mattered, and the runts of the litter can’t have been long for that world. But no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise, we men are still stuck in pretty much the same biological shell as we were in caveman days. We remain monkeys, we just wear shoes now - still subconsciously selecting women based on measurements like waist-to-hip ratio that indicate fertility.
The support for the idea that absolutely everything in the equation for sexual selection boils down to biology and chemicals is tenuous, but it seems intuitively plausible when you see studies showing taller men are more likely to have at least one biological child compared to shorter men, and women tend to look for taller partners during ovulation, for instance.
It is only much later on that our modern cultural expectations of femininity, and all the daintiness and smallness that goes with it, have come into play - as have notions of the desirability of matching with someone of good stock and professional success.
But these social norms can only serve to reinforce what our bodies were telling us to do anyway - as referenced earlier more intelligent males are taller more socially desirable, and the circular process where wealth leads to better environment which leads to greater height which leads to greater status in the world of work exists so prominently in our socio-economic structures that you could argue that it is not just the pure physical attraction of height, but what it signifies about the kind of life you lead that matters nowadays.
Next week: What we can learn from the animal kingdom about all of this.