Date Short Men.

It's not for their sake, it's for yours.

As Twitter is aflutter with women posting their requirements for a partner, many of which include a height requirement, I feel the need to offer some advice (and feel free to ignore it if your current strategy is working for you!)

Consider dating short men.

I’m not saying this because I feel bad for short men and they need the help. As the recipient of quite a few “pity bat mitzvah invites” in eighth grade, I can safely say it’s probably not fun to get a pity date either, so you shouldn’t date someone because you feel bad for them. Nor should you feel guilty for having physical preferences. My advice to date shorter men comes from a different place: because widening (or even eliminating) your height filter can be a solid strategy for you, as a heterosexual woman.

Obligatory: not all women care about height. Obviously, this article is not for the women who don’t. And I actually don’t think that many women have height as a dealbreaker. Instead, I think they will continually default to a preference for a taller guy if picking between two men who are interested. While there’s nothing wrong with a preference (and I’ll get to that later) repeatedly prioritizing height over other things (even other physical things) could do you a disservice.

It sometimes feels like there’s an elephant in the room when the topic of short men comes up. Some women, who I’m sure mean well, will insist that being short isn’t a problem for dating and that their ideal man is Jack Black. They’ll say that short men who blame their height on their lack of success have a victim mentality and women would like them if they just had a better attitude. And surely, some short men are so bitter about their height that their personality probably is the bigger problem.

See: Bagel Boss Guy, the chaotic presence who I’m convinced was the flap of a butterfly wing that kicked off the craziness that was 2020 (prove me wrong.) Bagel Boss Guy was a 5’0” man in his forties who started some kind of fight at a Bagel Boss shop in Long Island (no wonder his name was Bagel Boss Guy- nominative determinism at work) After having a verbal altercation with young women about his height (he believed they were laughing at him), he baited a man (who in the video appeared to be a full seven feet tall) into fighting him (declaring, “You’re not God, or my father, or my boss,”) ultimately whistling a different tune when the absolute unit actually took him up on his offer to fight. Bagel Boss Guy then Hawk Tuah’ed his way onto podcasts, where he showed off what we basically already knew, which was that he was a fairly unpleasant person. (In fact, he had been married before and divorced his wife because her breasts were too small. So he says, anyway.)

It’s easy to see short men complaining about their love lives and chalk it up to them being petulant Bagel Bosses, but it’s obtuse to pretend that being short isn’t a liability for straight men. Yes, short men find girlfriends and get married, but they are at a disadvantage (like any person with any uncontrollable physical feature that isn’t coded as attractive) because women overwhelmingly prefer tall men. You can say it. Sometimes it’s okay to say things that are true. In the words of the late great Hannibal Lector, “I tell it like it is.”

That doesn’t mean women have done anything morally wrong by preferring tall men. Ironically, the men who feel the need to moralize about this preference have their own litany of requirements, many of which include questionably narrow age filters (if exclusively dating women 15 years younger is working for you, go ahead, but if you’re struggling, that’s also worth reevaluating. And most men complaining on Twitter about women’s height preferences aren’t exactly drowning in pussy.)

You can’t help who you find attractive, and while height feels “unfair” because it’s out of our control, there are many things out of our control that men find important. Both men and women will filter based on race, age, body shape (not body size, body shape, which you can’t really control) and facial features. Height is just another one of these things. Is it fair? No. But neither is any of this.

But I’m not telling you to reevaluate a height requirement to be “fair.” This isn’t about equity. This is not “dating DEI,” as Fox News might say. This is about your odds of finding a guy who fits as many of your requirements as possible.