Partner Preferences and Dating Deal-breakers
On the mythical 6-foot boundary and a thought experiment with(out) Thor
Let’s start with a chart illustrating an observation that, by now, has become quite the dating meme.
In short (pun!), only 30% of women (who use a height filter, which is an important nuance) are even willing to look at profiles of men less than 5’11’’ tall (180 cm) on Bumble, which is supposed to be the ‘friendlier’ dating app.
Yes, it’s a well-worn meme by now, and honestly, all 69 glorious inches1 of me - a pretty average 175 cm - don’t care all that much. (He says while writing a whole post about it.) I can’t change my height, nor do I want to anymore. I’ve ‘grown’ into it and I like fitting in plane seats, but I want to use this height filter as an interesting example of how technology can reshuffle our priorities by sneakily turning preferences into deal-breakers.
Let me explain.
A not-quite-six-foot guy can go to the gym, learn to express his needs and emotions maturely, work on making something of himself, invest in hobbies (or side hustles?), actually listen to people, and so on. None of it will add vertical inches to his frame. The only way he’ll grow taller is by paying his life savings to have both of his legs broken and slowly pulled apart with limb-lengthening surgery. I’ve had one of my legs badly broken once; there’s no way I would ever consider paying to have that experience again.
But, I also understand the other (in this case female2) side of the equation. People have physical preferences for a partner, and for many women that includes, with varying importance, height3. Women have every right to have their preferences! Here, manosphere minions will come out of their virtual woods to say, “Yeah, but it’s silly for a short(er) girl to want a >6ft guy.” Sure, but it’s not about a guy being taller than them; it’s about a guy being taller than the average man, and, from a distance, 6 feet is a pretty good cut-off for assessing whether or not a guy qualifies as tall.
Hey, there are my manosphere pals again. “Yeah, but you can’t change your height. Women can change their bodies to make themselves look more desirable.” Meh, up to a point. For example, you can’t change your bone structure. If you’re a woman with narrow hips, it’s going to be nigh impossible to have the ‘desirable’ hip-to-waist ratio, no matter how much you build your upper leg muscles and/or starve yourself.
To an extent, we’re all shallow. And all of the above, I know, sounds dreadfully shallow.
After all, physical preferences are, to an extent, necessarily shallow4.
My point: physical preferences can be deal-breakers, but they don’t have to be. And this is where filters on dating apps can turn us against ourselves — by default, they turn preferences into deal-breakers. We are forced to compress (potential) attraction into a list of boxes to check. But attraction is weird; an intangible thing fluttering on butterfly wings. It’s shaped - yes - by physical preferences, but also by context, personal values, upbringing, culture, past experiences, and that impossible-to-predict feeling of connection.
That’s pretty vague, so it’s time for a thought experiment. Like all good thought experiments, it begins with a kernel of truth.
A while ago, I was browsing a quite detailed dating profile - anthropological fieldwork, you know - and I thought, “Huh, we seem to have enough fodder for interesting conversations and we align on a lot of personal values.” Then, I arrived at the list of partner preferences. Sure enough, front and center, ‘be taller than 6 feet’, with the explicit addition, ‘don’t even contact me if you’re not!’ Yes, with the exclamation mark.
*snaps fingers with pizzazz* Honey, I’d need heels to get there and I prefer (‘tis a day for puns) flat, lightweight shoes anyway.
For her, height was a deal-breaker, not just a preference. And that’s perfectly okay!
Here’s what it could have looked like if height had been a preference, but not a deal-breaker.
Through some magical intervention, she and I meet up. At first, there’s the 3-inch pang of disappointment, but heck, she’s here anyway, so why not have a coffee with this guy? Somehow, we navigate past the unique awkwardness of a first date, and… we hit it off. We smoothly skip beyond the small talk and have an actual deep conversation. We’re having fun and we both laugh out loud at various points. There’s physical contact - a hand on an arm, playfully brushing a shoulder - that feels entirely natural. As the afternoon tiptoes toward evening, we graduate from strangers into something else. Since this is a thought experiment, I might even add the wildly unrealistic possibility that when she squints and looks at me in the right lighting, there’s something she likes about my sharp features. She thought she preferred a Thor, and maybe she still does, but she might actually want to see this shorter, more Loki-like guy again and she’s curious to see where it goes.
In this delusional fantasy scenario, she still has a height preference. But it wasn’t a deal-breaker. To return to our Bumble graph, I wonder if/worry that a height filter forces a preference to be a deal-breaker. The people who don’t tick all our boxes are filtered away, so we don’t even get to see them.
I’m not saying that physical preferences (including height) shouldn’t or can’t be deal-breakers. They might as well be. We all have (the right to have) physical preferences, which are often instinctive and shallow, but that doesn’t invalidate them. By figuring out which - if any - of those physical desirables are deal-breakers, we get to decide what truly matters in a potential partner and what kind of relationship we want.
That’s powerful stuff.
Better than a height filter, don’t you think?
Info nibbles:
📽️ An interesting article on Sydney Sweeney and nepotism babies in Hollywood. Also contains this banger:
Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That's more than $21 per word in today's dollars… No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word.
(FYI, $1/word is still very good by today’s standards.)
🐦 Birds are pretty smart. A study finds out how they pack all that brainpower into 5-20 grams of brain tissue. In short: networking is key.
I knew some of you would be curious.
All of this assumes a heteronormative setup, mostly because that’s the one I have the most personal experience with and it’s the one we have the most data on. I’d love to hear other perspectives!
There is a difference in stated versus revealed preferences in psychology, aka what you say you want versus how your behavior reflects what you actually want. For the desired height of a male partner, the stated and revealed preferences of women point in the same direction (taller than average), but, interestingly, somewhat less strongly for the revealed preferences. In other words, on average, women (slightly) overestimate how important they find height in terms of real-life (especially longer-term) attraction. As written in the linked study (emphasis mine):
Couples where the male partner was shorter, or over 25 cm taller than the female partner, occurred at lower frequency in actual couples than expected by chance, but the magnitude of these effects was modest.
Let’s make it even more shallow. A much-publicized 2006 study found that 5’6’’ men need to earn $175,000 extra to be considered as attractive as an average 6’ guy on dating apps. Better get hustlin’…