The real reason women want to date tall men.

What does it mean when short women say they'll only date someone 6 feet or taller?

When women say they want a partner over 6ft, the justifications often sound practical: He should be taller than me in heels. I like feeling small next to him.

But when a woman is average height or shorter and still insists on an arbitrary 6ft cutoff? It’s not about practicality. It’s about status.¹

Romantic attraction isn’t just personal. Sure, you might genuinely like someone’s voice, their confidence, the way they hold themselves. But beneath that, there’s an older, quieter calculation happening—one shaped by millennia of social survival. Is this someone others also want?²

This isn’t usually a conscious thought. But it’s part of the equation. We don’t just choose partners based on chemistry; we’re also, in some way, assessing our place in an invisible hierarchy. And what better proof of status than being with someone who’s visibly in demand?

Here’s something telling: In countries that use the metric system, the desirable cutoff isn’t 6ft. It’s 180cm, which is actually 5’10.88”. Strangely, it’s consistently 180cm in Western countries and in Asian countries, which have very different average heights for men. What is consistent is that women strongly prefer relative tallness, but the actual lower bound filter given seems more symbolic than relative.³

I'd love to dismiss height as purely a status-driven preference, but the data won't let me. It’s weakly to modestly correlated⁴ with things like income, leadership roles, intelligence⁵, health, and even spousal happiness and health outcomes.⁶ Unlike wealth, social capital, or attractiveness, it's one of the few status markers that can't be gambled away, cancelled over a tweet, or lost to the sands of time. It’s passed down to offspring. It’s an immutable trait in a world where most status markers are unstable.

That said, these correlations are far too weak to be meaningful at the individual level. Every 5'6" hedge fund manager and 6'4" cashier proves this. More importantly, all the traits height hints at—resources, intelligence, health—can be directly signaled through other means.

In a place like the U.S.—where everyone’s striving but no one’s ever quite sure they’ve “made it”—height becomes a quick, legible signal. It’s the human equivalent of preferring a designer handbag over an identical unbranded one. The function is the same, but the meaning isn’t.

I wish I had better data to back this up, but there’s some anecdotal chatter on places like reddit that the USA is particularly height-obsessed. Is it a manifestation of status anxiety? I really wish a global dating app would let me poke their data to tell you.

But does more status actually make you more happy? This question speaks to a split between two measures: the day-to-day happiness of being with someone and the meaning imbued by being chosen by them. While there’s not a ton of studies, there’s one study of Indonesian married women where they actually have a small but statistically significant effect of increased happiness with taller mates.

I’m most fascinated by an often-cited happiness study that is about money, not husband height, which found emotional well-being plateaus around $75,000 a year (about $108,000 today). People love to quote it as proof that money can’t buy happiness! But they usually leave out the second part: Life satisfaction—the story people tell about their lives in hindsight—keeps rising with income, indefinitely, from minimum wage to Jeff Bezos billions.⁷

It suggests we chase some things—like wealth and tall men—not for how they’ll make us feel, but for how they’ll make us look, to others and to ourselves.

I think average height or shorter women who insist on 6ft+ men are prioritizing that second metric.

Of course, not all women care about height. Plenty prioritize other traits—humor, kindness, ambition. But when height is non-negotiable and beyond reasonably taller than the woman? That’s when it’s not just a preference. It’s a social signal.

And it’s not just women. Men do their own version of this, just with different markers. At its core, the unyielding height preferences reveal an uncomfortable truth about modern dating: we're never just choosing partners for ourselves. We're choosing them for the invisible audience in our heads - the friends who will raise their eyebrows, the parents who will nod approvingly, the strangers who will make snap judgments. It's status theater disguised as personal taste.

This explains why the preference persists even when it contradicts lived experience. Most women have dated wonderful shorter men. Many have dated tall men who were emotionally stunted. Yet the instinct remains, like a vestigial tail we haven't quite evolved past. Our lizard brains still believe that what looks impressive must feel impressive - even when lived reality proves otherwise.

None of this is to say preferences are wrong, or that attraction should be completely divorced from social perception. We are, after all, social creatures. But it's worth examining which of our "preferences" are truly ours, and which we've absorbed by osmosis.

More importantly, women should prioritize the underlying traits that height hints at. Don’t confuse the symbol for thing itself.

Don’t date a guy because he’s on a yacht that symbolizes wealth when in reality, he’s broke and borrowed it from a friend.

For Paid Subscribers: The Guide to Dating as an Average Height or Shorter Man

Let’s cut through the noise. If you’re a man under 6’0” (or worse, under 5’9”), dating apps can feel like a brutal marketplace where your height is a strike against you before you even open your mouth. But there’s concrete ways you can sidestep and blunt the effects of height with your profile and also your targeting. Behind the paywall are 8 concrete strategies for improving your dating success.