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I wish I was a little bit taller

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Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#41

Post by whatshisface »

abigail95 wrote: post #33
job_suche wrote: post #20

I am myself quite short (168cm). Growing up I had no insecurities about it, because I only started becoming short after puberty. Anyway, there was a period between ages 21 and 25 when I was obsessed about my height. Natural selection is pretty cruel. If you have good looks do not take them for granted. Now I care less about my height and more about my lack of hair. It is really not healthy to obsess over this stuff.…

If you allow me to assume you are male, my quickmafs thinks you're taller than 4/5 women, as opposed to the median male who is taller than 19/20 of women. Do other women want men taller than they are, or do they want men taller than other men? I don't understand the mechanism myself.

One time, I found a scatter plot of male and female heights in pairings, and there was a pretty clear drop-off at x=y. If you're really interested, that's the data source you'd want to have.

Of course, it wouldn't solve the causal question. Are women rejecting men who are shorter, or are men mentally gear-shifting around people who are taller than them? The latter might sound insulting, but that's actually what you'd want it to be, because then you could overcome it with a really good attitude. If all of the grown up monkeys going around in this world are programmed to let the big monkey do the bossing around, that's something you'd expect to see subconsciously acting on both sides - and you'd be able to deal with half of by yourself.

Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#44

Post by Wohlf »

avgDev wrote: post #35

I am 6'4". Flying sucks. Can't fit in a Miata and sports cars suck in general. Showers in hotels suck. Buying T-shirts is annoying. I did have a nice dating life....but I missed out a ton because I was a quite oblivious lol...now I'm married and it doesn't really matter.

If it makes you feel any better, except for t-shirts all of those still suck at 5'8" just less so.

Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#45

Post by kolbe »

job_suche wrote: post #20

I am myself quite short (168cm). Growing up I had no insecurities about it, because I only started becoming short after puberty. Anyway, there was a period between ages 21 and 25 when I was obsessed about my height. Natural selection is pretty cruel. If you have good looks do not take them for granted. Now I care less about my height and more about my lack of hair. It is really not healthy to obsess over this stuff.…

Regarding dating. If your goal is to find a great life partner and have a wonderful family, I find being short to actually be a benefit. Garbage women will self-select themselves out of your potential dating pool.

Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#46

Post by sys32768 »

After my divorce, I dove into the hetero online dating community and discovered that many men lie about their height in their online profile. This is more common among men because many women do in fact want a taller man. Similarly, men and women both often lie about their age in order to help their profile sneak around age filters used by others.

But the lying about height is pathetic and always backfires, often spectacularly, because the women can tell immediately when the guy shows up three or four inches shorter. So at that stage the problem is lying, not height, and it makes for a very awkward date if the date even continues.

Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#47

Post by rahimnathwani »

mikrl wrote: post #37

I wish I was a little bit more able to comfortably sit on an average office chair. I recommend the Haworth Very for taller folks. At the max height my femurs actually sit slightly above the horizontal plane containing my knees so I don’t feel boxed in.

I am a touch above 5'3". I've used a Haworth Very for the past ~5 years. My wife now has one, too.

With this chair:

- My feet can touch the floor, even without shoes

- The armrests can move down to the place where my forearms naturally rest

- The armrests can point from my elbows to the front corners of my keyboard

- I can sit for long periods without my any discomfort

Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#49

Post by RajT88 »

tcfhgj wrote: post #5

> According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than…

Learn to play guitar! Ideally singing while strumming.

Re: I wish I was a little bit taller

#50

Post by alienchow »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #3

Tall people die younger, have more joint and back pain, and have trouble finding shirts that fit. See a shirt in a store? On me a L is a belly shirt and an XL is a baggy belly shirt. I’m tall and wish I was average and I’m not even “super tall” just 76”/193cm. I straight up feel sorry for people taller than I. They end up on crutches before dying in their 60s. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1600586/

I'm very much below the national average height for my gender. After a while you'd start hoping that conversations occur at your eye level instead of flying over your head. Practically everyone I know from the same gender and half the other gender are taller than me. It's difficult to quantify the psychological impact of always having to metaphorically wave your hand in the air to get attention. Or when you invite friends over and every time you open the door, you find their eyes looking over your head before looking down seemingly to say "oh there you are". In the article, one of the patients at 5' 5" talked about being ignored by the bartender because a taller customer talked over him. That is something I actually experience fairly frequently.

WFH has been wonderful for this reason, everyone is a half body stump on camera.

I don't think the people in the article are aiming to be super tall. Just tall enough to match their peers. Arguably super tall people (YMMV since everyone is tall to me) and short people both want the same thing, to be average.

With all that being said, I don't find the tradeoff of cost, lost time, immobility, and pain to be worth that marginally extra social respect. And to be honest, it's just a mild annoyance.

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