Women have been offering their opinion on what height they’d like their partners to be, as part of a totally scientific and not at all subjective study.
Don’t worry, short kings, we’re not about to start piling in on everyone who isn’t six feet tall here.
Remember, it ultimately doesn’t matter how tall you are, and anyone who is judging their potential partners solely on that is as shallow as a puddle and probably not worth your time anyway.
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That said, people do look at things like this, and anyone who has ever had a cursory scroll through a dating app will have seen that some people like to state their preferences quite clearly and from the start.
So, with that all out of the way, let’s get to the study, shall we?
The researchers had a look at personal preferences for height in romantic partners and spotted that - as you might imagine - women and men have quite different expectations, and both might need to wind their neck in, both figuratively and literally.
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The sample for this rigorous experiment was more than 500 people aged between 15 and 77, from Cuba, Canada, the United States, and Norway.
They were measured, then asked about what they would look for in a partner for both a short-term and long-term relationship.
The whole thing was based on line drawings of men and women with their heights stated, with the participants then choosing their preferred height for a partner of either sex.
It’s worth pointing out at this stage that 93 percent of those surveyed identified as heterosexual.
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Participants could choose multiple heights if applicable, although only 2.6 percent eventually did.
Let’s get to the results, shall we?
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The average height for male participants was five feet and 10 inches, while for women it was five feet five inches - that’s 178 and 165 centimetres respectively.
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With those average numbers, it seems that some might need to lose a bit of rigidity in their standards.
The preferences were quite different, with men preferring women who are shorter than them, specifically 2.5 centimetre - or about an inch - shorter than the average height for women.
Women, on the other hand, wanted their men to be taller than them, and 2.3 centimetres, or 0.9 inches, taller than the average height for men.
In terms of relationship length, curiously men preferred shorter women for shorter term relationships.
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Wonder what that is about?
The researchers wrote: “These results provide preliminary evidence that, in addition to mate preferences for other physical traits related to mate quality such as masculinity in the body, face, and voice, assortative preferences for height do vary as a function of expected relationship length, but this was surprisingly only observed in preferences for female height.”
Obviously, there are problems with this - the relatively small sample size and the fairly crude visual representations used to pick, but it’s an interesting area of study for the researchers.
In the future, getting a broader sample size from different countries around the world will provide results with greater depth.
Oh, it’s worth remembering too that those in the USA self-reported their heights online, and nobody has ever lied about their height, right?
The study was published in journal Frontiers in Psychology.
Topics: Science, Sex and Relationships
Tom Wood