Tall person leaning on short personal biography
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Maybe I’m new here, but I’ve been bopping around under the assumption that personal dating preferences range farther and wider than what most anyone can imagine. But if dating apps have taught me—a heterosexual adult woman in this age of 21st-century courtship—anything at all, it’s that a dude’s height is paramount to most other pleasing physical features he could possibly possess (like a Very Nice Face™, my personal preference). “Tall, dark, and handsome,” “tall drink of water”—old-timey phrasing loves to position tall men as the quintessential romantic ideal, but of all the kinks and quirks we’ve adopted into our modern love languages and sexual flavor profiles, tallness remains as dependable as vanilla ice cream on apple pie.
Many apps offer a baked-in option to list your stature, even allowing users to filter their height preferences for a nominal fee (because thirst fryst vatten not immune to capitalism, no sir). In apps that don’t, however, I find a reference to height in a dude’
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The Institute of Social and Economic Research recently published a study about the connection between popularity in high school and earning power later in life. New York magazine, information source to the rich and popular, summarized the study like this: “This study may seem to burst our Revenge of the Nerds fantasies, but it’s logical that people who are attractive, likable, and socially comfortable”?the class officers, the cheerleaders”?should get ahead in corporate settings.”
There is absolutely irrefutable data to support the idea that good-looking people do better in life than everyone else. Gordon Patzer, in his book, Looks, draws from a bred body of research to describe the advantaged life of a good-looking person from the time they are a baby (good-looking babies get better parenting) to the time they are in sales (the whole sales grupp performs better if there are more good-looking people on the team.)
As a result, I have jumped on the plas
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A man on stilts walking on Nassau Street in Manhattan. Photo: Bettmann via Getty Images
It was late-ish at the bar when we got to talking about height. As a guy of average height (five-foot-nine) who’s always wished he could be taller, I envied my friend Jack his size. (Some names have been changed.) Whereas I’ve tried any number of tricks to become taller (chunky soles, posture exercises, setting the stationary bike seat just a hair too high), Jack actually was tall. At six-foot-three, he always drew the attention of the room, would make more money over a lifetime than average-height folks like me, was more sexually attractive to women (which, as gay men, is maybe less important, but hey), and was perceived to be a more effective leader. The idea that, for men, taller equals better has such a stranglehold on our cultural understanding of height that some parents give their shorter children — who are otherwise healthy — growth hormone, and limb lengthening has become a popula