" If I'm feeling charitable, I answer honestly: "6-foot-2." They often follow-up with, "Do you ever date shorter men? And online, it's even more brutal: Women can calculate how tall they are in their highest heels, add a few inches for good measure, and then filter out men who fall below that sum.
All facts that ring true to me — my dude pulls his weight around our house, and was game to date me even though I was 28 and he was 24 when we met.
Though the paper didn't delve into why this disparity exists, I think we might be able to chalk it up to empathy.
When you date a guy who's around the same height as you, a kiss can just be a kiss, no step stools or pulley systems required. When I was dating around, I found the idea of dating a super-tall guy who had never had to ask a sales associate to help him get a box of Cap'n Crunch down exotic; but I'm glad that I settled down with someone who gets me on every level — including the level where I'm in a constant state of rage about how all jeans are too long for my legs.
I had a long relationship with a dude who was 6'2" — a whole foot taller than me. A recent study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found that guys under 5'9" had sex more often than their taller counterparts. When I met my boyfriend, I assumed that he'd be sensitive about the height thing, and resigned my extensive and expensive heel collection to the back of my closet, switching them out for Converse and flats.
Plus, the idea that the only way you can feel like a "real woman" in bed is to be smaller than your partner smells like anti-feminist propaganda to me, frankly.
Why doesn't everyone just try to be whatever size they actually are, and just bang the hell out of each other that way?Many years ago, before I fell in love with a short guy, I was one of the many American women who only had eyes for the tall ones.I'm sure you're familiar with the situation — I salivated over any dude who was over six feet, even though, at 5' 2", being with a tall guy just meant that trying to kiss each other while standing up was not unlike trying to parallel park a compact car. And I was far from the only woman who found herself drawn to tall dudes for reasons she never quite thought through.A 2012 survey of college students found that 89 percent of women were only interested in partners taller than them (while 47 percent of men were open to dating a woman who was taller them).48 percent of women dating online are only interested in men who are taller than them, and a study of online dating in the New York City area found that men who fell below the average American male height of 5'9" typically had a less than five percent chance of having women reach out to them.Of course the ability to search for people who meet our criteria is part of the appeal of online dating.