Swipe Right is our advice column that tackles the tricky world of online dating. This week: man who is 5’6 needs to own his height and forget about rude women. As long as you keep the relationship online. You meet this person and she expects a 5′8 man and she meets a 5′5 man it won’t be pleasant. I am not saying you are 5′5 i’m just using it as an example. She will look at you scratch her head may say so.

You've probably heard at least one woman say they only like to date people who are taller than they are. There are plenty of reasons a person might feel that way: to feel protected, to have someone around to reach items on high shelves, to sit on someone's shoulders during a concert. Kidding aside, I combed the internet to see if women care about height — or if that's just a myth.

As you might guess, responses varied. There are some women who are as strict as can be about only wanting to date people a certain height or taller. Some are more lenient with this 'rule,' specifying that they just want to date someone taller than themselves. Then, there are those who would rather date someone their height, and then, of course, there are those who straight-up do not care.

I know I've seen my fair share of dating app profiles where people will share their height, followed by a nonchalant 'if it matters.' For me, I don't really care about someone else's height that much — I wouldn't really want someone nit-picking my body. Here's what others had to say on the subject.

At 6'1', this female Reddit user is definitely taller than the average 5'4' woman in the United States, and she had previously stuck to her own dating rule of 'dating same height or taller.'

But, something changed, and she's currently dating a guy who's 5'6'.

'He's cute,' she explained on the thread.

'I'm really tall (6'0') and I find that while men find this intimidating and a turn off, women seem to find it very attractive,' a bisexual woman said in a thread about dating. 'I love being tall, I just wish it didn't make so many men insecure. I'd have no problem dating a guy shorter then me ... but many men have such a weird complex about height that it really bothers them.'

Reddit Dating Apps

'Dated a guy briefly in college who was probably an inch or two shorter than me (I'm 5'7'),' another Reddit user explained. 'He was cute and I liked him, but when he started worrying about what shoes I would wear when we went out, I knew it wouldn't work. I didn't even wear heels back then — he was freaking out over Doc Martens.'

'Dated a guy who was shorter than me by two inches,' another person said in the thread. 'The height itself was not an issue for me, but the fact that he blamed any problem he had on his height, and was obsessed with people 'judging' him, was f*cking annoying.'

'I've had serious relationships with average and tall men in the past but, I am happily married to a man who is about the same height as I am,' she said in the Reddit discussion. 'In all respects, I find being with a shorter man much more rewarding. For example, he understands the difficulty I have reaching high shelves and I don't get a crick in my neck looking into his eyes.'

Someone on the thread asked if it's a 'deal breaker' on a first date.

'I'm 5'5' (maybe a hair less), a pretty average height,' another person replied. 'It's not a 'F*ck, I gotta get out of here, stat,' kind of deal breaker, but I'd question it. It has a lot to do with not wanting to feel huge next to the guy. And the deep-rooted [desire] of having someone bigger, stronger, etc. who will protect you.'

'I'm 5'8' and I have a couple of friends who are like 5'3' and 10 [to] 20 [pounds] lighter than me and it would just never occur to me to think of them [romantically],' another user added to the thread.

'The guy I'm currently seeing is shorter then most of the guys I've dated (I'm 5'3', he's about 5'5'), and when I first met him I was a bit thrown off by it,' she said on Reddit. 'I admit I did have the thought that he's too short for me, I can't wear heels now, etc., but then I got to know him and honestly, it really isn't an issue anymore. I find him incredibly sexy, and our lack of height difference makes kissing and cuddling really easy.'

'I much prefer guys to be at least 6'0', especially because I like to wear heels sometimes,' she said in the discussion. 'My biggest turn-on is height; if a guy is like, 6'6', I'm instantly attracted to him.'

Height Dating Reddit Women

'With that said, confidence (but not short-man syndrome cockiness) can definitely make up for lack of height. I dated a guy an inch or two shorter than me because he didn't give a f*ck, never even mentioned it, and carried himself like he was taller.'

'I actually prefer men who are my height or not much taller, 5' 9' or 5' 10,' max,' a Reddit user said. 'I'm actually uncomfortable around men who are a lot taller than I am, and I tend not to be attracted to them. I like to face my guys eye-to-eye. I don't want to be towered over. I've never been attracted to someone shorter than myself, but I don't discount it.'

'I'm 5'8' and my boyfriend is 5'3',' someone else shared. 'I'm so much more happy with him than I was with my 6'2' ex. Height is irrelevant — personality is what's important.'

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Many years ago, before I fell in love with a short guy, I was one of the many American women who only had eyes for the tall ones. I'm sure you're familiar with the situation — I salivated over any dude who was over six feet, even though, at 5' 2', being with a tall guy just meant that trying to kiss each other while standing up was not unlike trying to parallel park a compact car. But I believed the tall guy hype anyway.

And I was far from the only woman who found herself drawn to tall dudes for reasons she never quite thought through. A 2012 survey of college students found that 89 percent of women were only interested in partners taller than them (while 47 percent of men were open to dating a woman who was taller them). 48 percent of women dating online are only interested in men who are taller than them, and a study of online dating in the New York City area found that men who fell below the average American male height of 5'9' typically had a less than five percent chance of having women reach out to them. The man is the shorter partner in only four percent of heterosexual pairings.

Average Height Dating Reddit

Why? If you ask any height-obsessed woman — or me, a decade ago — they'll probably feed you some line about a tall man making them feel 'safe' or 'tiny.' But let's unpack that for a second. What are we saying when we say we want a big man to make us feel tiny? Are we saying that we believe that it's sexually ideal that women take up as little space as possible, that we're at our most attractive when we look itty bitty compared to our male partner? You don't need a women's studies degree to know that that's whack. Also, I have a women's studies degree and I say it's whack. Being obsessed with men's height — in a way that you'd never obsess about any other one of their qualities — is bad for women, bad for dating, and reinforces a society that says physical traits we can't control are more important than who we really are or what we achieve.

As someone who falls two inches short of the average female height, I never even thought that dating a guy my height was an option worth thinking about. But I'm glad I did. Today, I'm about to celebrate my fifth anniversary with a wonderful dude who is roughly my height, and I would like you to know that height ain't nothing but a number. But if you need more convincing, please read on for 11 reasons to consider letting a short dude into your life/heart/vagina.

(And yes, all of the GIFS below feature male celebrities who are 5'8' or shorter. Free your minds, people!)

1. Kissing is less awkward

You'll never again have to engage in that weird orchestrated moment of stretching and bending, where you can't really enjoy the kiss because you're on your tiptoes and your super-tall dude is hunched over at a weird angle, and everyone involved is about to develop a hernia. When you date a guy who's around the same height as you, a kiss can just be a kiss, no step stools or pulley systems required.

2. You run into fewer sexual positioning problems

I had a long relationship with a dude who was 6'2' — a whole foot taller than me. When we stood side-by-side, his penis was about even with my abdomen, which made sex exactly as awkward as you'd imagine. Trying to reconcile height disparities while boning involved a lot of crouching on unstable structures made out of stacked pillows and crawling around on tables, trying to use my D+ in high school Geometry to make all the angles line up. With a short dude, there's no problem — all your parts align, and you're free to get creative, instead of spending all your time just trying to get your genitals on the same visual plane.

3. There is no correlation between height and penis size

Seriously. Trust me. Or don't! Trust this 1993 study, published in the way-too-entertaingly-titled Annals of Sex Research, which found that there was basically no connection between height and penis size. But also, seriously, trust me. No connection at all.

Reddit Online Dating

4. Short guys have more sex

A recent study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found that guys under 5'9' had sex more often than their taller counterparts. Who knows why? Are they all having sex with me? Is that it? (I'm not free to release that information, sorry)

5. If you're short, short guys can empathize with your small-person problems

I am a person with many hobbies and interests, but I will freely admit to you that the majority my life is about how I can't ever reach anything that's located on a top shelf at the grocery store. When I was dating around, I found the idea of dating a super-tall guy who had never had to ask a sales associate to help him get a box of Cap'n Crunch down exotic; but I'm glad that I settled down with someone who gets me on every level — including the level where I'm in a constant state of rage about how all jeans are too long for my legs.

6. You won't have to give up heels

When I met my boyfriend, I assumed that he'd be sensitive about the height thing, and resigned my extensive and expensive heel collection to the back of my closet, switching them out for Converse and flats. But soon after we got together, he asked why I had so many heels that I never wore. It turned out that he loved me in heels — and also, he had made his peace with his height and his body, and didn't need me to change the way I dressed or the things I liked to make him feel more like a man. Short guys know they are short, and very few of them will demand that you make concessions about it (the ones who do are jerks, obvi).

7. Short guys live longer than tall guys

Short men live two years longer than tall men, on average — good news for any of my fellow morbid straight women who spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if they or their partner will die first.

8. Short guys don't have a Napoleon complex

Being short doesn't make you power-hungry, demanding, or give you something to prove. Jerks come in all shapes and sizes, yo.

9. You don't need to feel 'tiny' in order to feel sexy

Dating Height Difference Reddit

I've encountered a lot of women who say that they only want to hook up with taller dudes because they want to feel 'tiny' and like they're being 'ravished' in bed. To which I can only reply: dude, have you ever actually been ravished? It has nothing to do with height, unless your main sexual fetish is being carried back and forth across a room, over and over again. Sexiness, virility, and even old-fashioned machismo are not outside the domain of shorter guys.

Plus, the idea that the only way you can feel like a 'real woman' in bed is to be smaller than your partner smells like anti-feminist propaganda to me, frankly. Why doesn't everyone just try to be whatever size they actually are, and just bang the hell out of each other that way?

10. Only dating guys who are above a certain height is pretty superficial

Height Online Dating Reddit

Listen, what turns you on is what turns you on, and if you can really only get a wide-on for dudes over six feet, that's a-okay. But if you're only into tall guys, I would urge you to think about why you'll only date tall guys. Imagine meeting a guy who said he'd only date girls with D cup boobs or larger. You'd think he was a total pig, right? You'd also think his priorities were all out of whack — having big boobs has nothing to do with being a good partner, or even being a good lover or physically attractive. Do you see where I'm going with this? It's worth looking inside yourself, and seeing if height is what actually turns you on, or just what society has taught you to prize in a partner.

11. Men who are into dating women who are taller than them can be pretty enlightened

Of course, this dating/height bias goes both ways. A lot of men want to date a woman who is physically smaller than them, for the same reasons that a lot of women want to hook up with tall guys: that's how society says it should go, and it physically replicates our social ideas of the roles men and women should play in heterosexual relationships — that men should be big and powerful, and that women should be less powerful.

That's why a guy who's game for dating a taller woman might have more progressive ideas about dating and women in general, too — a 2014 study suggested that men 5'7' and shorter did more housework, were less likely to get divorced, and were more open to dating older women. All facts that ring true to me — my dude pulls his weight around our house, and was game to date me even though I was 28 and he was 24 when we met. Though the paper didn't delve into why this disparity exists, I think we might be able to chalk it up to empathy. Short men have been considered 'less than' by a culture that still equates height with masculinity, and this has opened their eyes to what a crock traditional gender roles can be.

Obviously, not all short guys are male feminists, and not all tall guys are cavemen who think you should go make them a sandwich. But short men have a different cultural experience than tall men, and I believe that this can make them excellent lovers, amazing boyfriends, and sensitive partners.

Or they're just better boyfriends because their faces are already located closer to your vagina. Either way, score!

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