I was noting just yesterday that I am sufficiently shallow to not date someone shorter than myself. But I’m 5’4", so that doesn’t really disqualify that many guys. My first love was 5’7".
Female perspective here, but I do sincerely remember the angst of being a plain, gawky, nerdy, socially awkward teenager, and yes, it was unbelievably un-fun. I didn’t date in high school. My social life was marching band, math team, student newspaper, and quiz bowl. I despaired of ever being anything except a lonely teen.
And then something magical happened: university. Not MIT or Harvard, just a good state school. The most important thing I learned there had very little to do with academics. I learned that I didn’t have to fit into my self-imposed little box. I wasn’t just “the smart one,” hell, I wasn’t even particularly smart, compared to many of my new schoolmates. But I was smart enough. I wasn’t and never would be conventionally pretty, but I was and am attractive - just not in a small town cheerleader sort of way. I got past my morbid self-consciousness: no one else was paying me that much attention, and picking apart my every flaw. I learned to enjoy moments, instead of critiquing my place in whatever situation I was in. And that’s the real joy of being a grown-up: figuring out how to be reflective and self-aware, versus self-conscious. It’s a very liberating thing.
The process is slow, and often no fun, but you’ll get there.
You actually hit the jack pot being short, because now you can grow yourself a giant persecution complex and blame everything bad that ever happens to you on being short. Foster your Napoleon complex and by the time you’re 30 or so you’ll be completely insufferable.
If I decide to have a height persecution complex can I choose option B and become an emperor who chooses to get involved in a long, tedious land war in Russia?
mrAru is 5’7".
I do slightly prefer taller men. Not super tall, but not short. Even if tall men have some advantage (and I’m sure they do) that doesn’t mean the OP’s fear is founded that he has no chance. It’s still just one factor and 5’7 is not far enough off from average to be an absolute deal-breaker for most women.
Couple thoughts:
Past a certain point, dating isn’t a numbers game. Let’s say 50% of women just flat-out won’t date a guy under 5’10". This makes no difference. As long as their exists some number of women who don’t reject you for your height, there will be plenty of women available. More potential dates doesn’t really make any difference: you can’ only date so many.
But you are thinking “wait! wait! If there are only 10 girls in my high school who might date me, that cuts it down to 5, and then the chances of me liking one of those 5 is much less!” But it doesn’t work that way. There are hundreds of factors that go into dateability, and they are interdependent. It’s not a simple equation, it’s some sort of ungodly game theory/differential equation/regression statistics thing. A lot of the girls that might reject you for your height would have been the same ones that rejected you for something else, so you can’t double count them. In fact, by the time all is said and done, I don’t think any one factor ends up having a dramatic effect because of all those interactions: it’s all redundant.
Next point: the best way to deal with this is not be so damn picky yourself. What are your rules? What are your deal breakers? If you want to be attractive to women, go out with lots of women. Be open-minded. Don’t immediately rule people out because of minor physical features, or a lack of immediate physical attraction, or because they don’t fit your idea of your type. Date the girls that DON’T make you go weak in the knees and start to babble incoherently: date the girls you can talk to just like a dude because they don’t overwhelm you. Date girls you have nothing in common with, and learn about a different world by talking to them. All this is boot camp to learn how women think, how to behave, how to be comfortable with women. It’s also a much better way for you to learn what you really do care about and what you just assume you care about because you’ve never really self-reflected.
Probably not. Few of us do these days. Oh, you’ll probably have a dating life. You’ll have a lust life. You’ll have a lot of fun and heartbreak and terrible relationships where you make all kinds of errors in judgment. You may, if you want, have a sex life (although you’re still statistically on the young side for that). You will fall in love and out of love, sometimes on the same night. You’ll date people that 10 months or 10 years later you’ll wonder what the hell you were thinking. You’ll make every mistake in the book and write a few new chapters.
Then you’ll hit your late 20s or early 30s and, if you’ve played your cards right and done your personal work and grown up a bit, you’ll be a specimen actually worth falling in love with. That’s when your real love life will begin. When you first love someone more than you love yourself, and you never have to think of what to say because she inspires you to think new thoughts, instead of scaring them out of your head.
Dude, if you like Doper ladies, why should you care what those who can’t spell think?
And if you don’t like ladies who can spell, then yeah, why did you ask us?
This is perhaps the best advice on this topic. In the other topic, I stated that online height is one of my deciding factors. IRL it might not be. Your confidence and personality can tip the scales. Work on your confidence. Work on being at ease in social situations. Make a woman feel beautiful, make her laugh, learn to engage her mind. You know, almost as if she was a real person and not just a delivery vehicle for pussy.
Confidence can also be manifest in accepting who you are, and not lamenting and focussing on who you are not.
Bald guys get more action than comb overs because accepting what you cannot change is a sign of maturity, and women find that appealing.
Young girls however crush on handsome tall boys just like young men crush on pretty and chesty girls. Such is nature, I’m afraid. Things will shift a little in the years ahead as maturity arrives in full and life experiences begin to pile up.
If you really wish to exude the kind of confidence that draws women to consider you, then you need to focus on self development - not your height. Get out there and do something to make someone else (anyone!) happy. Do something that you’ll be proud of, something that challenges you, and maybe scares you a little, too.
You’re not supposed to seek true love. You’re supposed to seek to be worthy of true love!
Because most of us have a lot more exes than we do current spouses. It’s just numbers. I have had meaningful (and meaningless, come to think of it) relationships with more short men than tall men. The man I married most recently happens to be tall. But his height has nothing to do with why I married him, and their height had nothing to do with why I didn’t marry them.
I also divorced a tall man, if that helps you feel any better. Not 'cause he was tall though, but mostly because he was a selfish insecure jerk who tore me down to make himself feel better. So I can definitely suggest that you not become a selfish insecure jerk who tears your lovers down to make yourself feel better. I think that’s a pretty safe piece of advice, and easier to create in yourself than tallness. Not easy, maybe, but easier.
This here. Alternately, if you really are having difficulty getting a grip on your anxious feelings, get yourself a good workbook via Amazon or something, on using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to combat anxiety. They have one for depression as well. It’s all self-guided, and CBT works on beating those self-defeating thought spirals that hamstring you, and make you worry about things like this in a way that will emotionally cripple you before you even get a chance to experience whether that will be true or not.
And this too. Dan Savage has a very “not safe for work/school/parents who monitor a teen’s Internet usage” close version of this that also includes some advice on not “death-gripping” and on varying up your technique while wanking, plus learning about STDs and their prevention, etc.
That’s another thing. I haven’t found myself yet. You people have any tips on how to find your purpose in life? I know it’s only something I can do, but some tips would be helpful. Because if only I knew my purpose in life, that would help me in getting some confidence.
He can’t (nor can I or anyone else unless they have super powers) just detect a shallow girl from far without asking them out. It’s not like he’s trying to chase shallow women; it’s that they just keep coming up.
And just because a girl rejects you because of your height doesn’t mean they aren’t a great person. They can be, and probably are. They can’t help it - it’s what they’re attracted to. I have said this on other forums: it’s not the girls’ fault - it’s what they’re attracted to. We all find things attractive as well as unattractive and the problem is that for the majority of women, shortness is unattractive. It doesn’t mean that they’re shallow - they can’t control who they are attracted to. Would you want to go out with someone that you don’t find attractive?
It’s this natural selection trying to prevent me and other short guys from reproducing to get rid of our inferior gene.
This website is a good free CBT workshop if you’re more digitally inclined: moodgym - Interactive skills training for depression and anxiety
What’s your purpose in life? It’s to *create *your purpose in life. It’s not to “find” your purpose in life or even to “find yourself.” You won’t find yourself, that’s a lie spread by new-age gurus who want you to buy their book to find yourself in its pages. You won’t. You will create yourself. You will create yourself not once, but many times over your life.
The days of one career, one you are over, if they ever did exist. Look at Benjamin Franklin. Who was he? He was a writer. No, he was a diplomat. No, he was an inventor. No, he was a printer. No, he was a labor organizer. He was ALL of those, and more. Maybe not all at once, but sequentially. If he’d waited to find his purpose in life, at least half his accomplishments would have gone undone. He created his purpose in life, and gave himself the freedom to recreate himself periodically.
Ever watch Buffy? I know, it aired even before you were born, but Buffy has a wonderful, funny and heartfelt speech in one episode, talking to her much older boyfriend who she’s breaking up with: “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.”
You’re cookie dough. And that’s okay. What Buffy didn’t realize (because she was still young cookie dough) is that we’re ALL cookie dough, and we’re not a single cookie. We’re cookie dough base, and what we add to that base determines what cookie we may be, and yet we’re never baked into permanence. We can add chocolate chips, and then later we can decide we don’t want to be chocolate chips anymore and we can become snickerdoodles.
Your problem as I see it is that your intellectual development has thus far outpaced your emotional/social development. You are smart and aware enough to look at a world of “cookies” around you and want to be a cookie. What those cookies mostly won’t admit to you, though, is that we’re all still cookie dough. All those “grown-ups” around you who have everything figured out and know who they are and how to handle every crisis and know how to fall in love with the right person? They don’t. Oh, maybe a couple do. But most of them don’t. Most of them are creating themselves every morning when they wake up. Most of us are cookie dough, too. And that’s not a weakness, that’s freedom. That’s the power of creation. Pick some mix-ins for today, and see if you’re happy with the results. If you’re not, pick some new mix-ins for tomorrow.
Please don’t think I’m picking on you. I’m not, I really have very much compassion for you, because I was there, too. And the only thing that fixed it for me was realizing that I could - no, I *had *to - create my own purpose in life. At some point, it didn’t matter anymore if it was the right purpose in life, because I was allowed to get it wrong and start over. It was never about “finding myself,” it was always about *creating *myself. And I’m who I am now, right now. I may decide to be someone else tomorrow, and that will be okay, too.
Something else I wanted to add - I have two female friends who are taller than average, and both of them have told me that they don’t mind dating guys shorter than them (they both married shorter guys) - it’s that a lot of the guys they met had issues with dating taller women. My friends didn’t give a shit about how tall their partners were, but often the guys would be really bothered by it and make self-deprecating remarks or try to discourage them from wearing heels. Huge turn-off, as you can imagine.
Totally a projection of your insecurity.
You keep feeding that monster and it will consume you. Being consumed by self absorbed imagined/manufactured/exaggerated ‘flaws’ makes you give off the stench of weakness that repels women/girls. And it certainly won’t make you taller.
As you define yourself, so shall you be! Now, go back and take a good look at how you chose to define yourself in this thread. If that’s your opinion of yourself why should anyone bother to look upon you otherwise?
First question to ask - what do YOU want to do with your life?
Do you want to travel around the world? Do you want to learn to fly airplanes? Do you want to sail in a boat race? Do you want to have a career with steady career prospects and income - maybe an accountant? Do you want to raise chickens and llamas as a hobby? Do you want a kick-ass stamp collection?
First try to figure out your priorities. Once you figure out what you want you can start working on how to get there. That might require training, or education, or doing some research on your own. Right now you need to be exploring your options, seeing what’s out there, and trying new things.
The other thing to remember is that over time your “purpose in life” might change. When you’re twenty it might be finishing college, partying, and getting a decent job. When you’re thirty it might be raising your kids. When you’re 70 it might be fishing and not having too much joint pain.
VERY few people have height as a complete kill-switch on their interest in others. MOST of us wind up with folks who aren’t perfectly attractive and we’re entirely OK with that.
I like dark-haired men with beards and body hair - but my spouse had light brown hair (it’s white now) and couldn’t grow a beard to save his life. I have more body hair than he does (that’s what I get for marrying someone more than half Cherokee). I’m not attracted to scars at all, but after 30+ surgeries in his lifetime he’s got a lot of them, some of them quite large and ugly. I like men who dance but my spouse physically can’t do that. So why did I marry him? Because he’s kind, he supports me when I try something new or hard or scary, he builds me up instead of tearing me down like some many other guys out there, he makes me laugh, we’re both science fiction geeks and trekkers and Dr. Who fanatics… we have so much in common that the not-so-beautiful things are easy to overlook or work around. Would I prefer he conformed more to my physical ideal? Well, yeah, and I’d prefer to have skin that wasn’t so sensitive and prone to rashes and acne, perfect eyesight, and a great singing voice but I don’t and won’t and worry about things I can actually do something about. Neither of us are physically perfect, we don’t worry about it, and get on with our lives.
When you’re a teenager yes, all too often it’s all about looks. As you get older - and you don’t have to get much older, just into your 20’s - people start to realize there are no physically perfect matches out there, you’re not going to wind up with your physical ideal, and the vast majority stop rejecting people over height or eye color or the like.
That’s why we keep saying cultivate something else in yourself. My spouse was short and walked with a severe limp but when he was a performing musician he had all the women he wanted (for a brief time after we married I got into a few… um… discussions with groupies who wanted access to him and didn’t understand he was off-limits now). There are women who find musicians incredibly sexy even if they’re short, too skinny, too fat, bald, hairy, funny looking, or smell bad - which is why 1960’s era rock musicians pretty much got laid whenever they wanted, as much as they wanted
If you’re not comfortable being a comedian or musician then be something else. Just be the go-to guy for something.
For the vast majority of people “attractive” isn’t based solely on one trait. A LOT of women overlook the shortness of their mate because it’s outweighed by other factors they find more positive. It’s no different than a man who likes to look at big tits marrying a flat-chested woman - clearly, she has many other positive qualities that outweigh her lack in that area. Yes, that sort of pairing does happen.
Actually, from a health standpoint being slightly short might be a positive. Very tall men tend to have back problems, joint problems, and die earlier than men of average or slightly less than average height.
More importantly, stop thinking of yourself as inferior. Concentrate on your assets and cultivate them.
[QUOTE=Anonymous User]
We all find things attractive as well as unattractive and the problem is that for the majority of women, shortness is unattractive.
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No. Just not the case. It may very well be (and I doubt it) that the majority of women find tallness more attractive than shortness. But even if that were the case, very few women find shortness a turnoff - lack of attraction to one particular trait is not the same as repulsion by that trait. I’ll stand by my statement that any woman who will just blankly reject any short man is a terrible person - unless of course she happens to have an actual tallness fetish, in which case, yeah, tough luck. But those women will be just as rare as the women with other very narrow paraphilias, and I guarantee they find it to be much more of a problem than you do.
Attraction is not a binary. You can be attracted to a whole person even though the single parts of that person aren’t on your specific list of attractive traits.
I prefer chocolate chip ice cream. I’ll always like any ice-cream with chocolate chips (unless it’s gone off or something) Doesn’t mean I won’t like any one ice-cream without chips. I might even like a particular chip-less flavor better than a particular chipped one. Or I might be thrilled to have cookies instead of ice-cream. That’s not settling, that’s just appreciating the variety of life.
What I think helps the most is to do something. Take on projects. It really don’t matter what they are as long as they challenge you. Decide to learn to play an instrument, or speak a language, or do magic tricks and teach yourself. Read things that are hard to understand until you understand them.
I know very bright high school students. I’ve been teaching them for decades, and I am currently at the sort of ultra-competitive STEM magnet that attracts kids like you in droves. And I will tell you–the ones that grow into the best young men and women are the ones that are interested in things and willing to do the work to find things out, to master skills, to discover. They are the ones that spend Saturdays fucking around with something–be it a computer programming language, the Shavian alphabet, mental math techniques, or Gravity’s Rainbow. The ones that never amount to much are the ones that do what is expected, what is assigned, what they have to do, and just fill the rest of their time with Xbox or pot or music or “hanging out”. And it’s not the xbox or the pot or the music or the hanging out that is so bad–it’s that they are doing those things not because they have a passion for them, but because they don’t have a passion for anything, and those are easy ways to fill up the hours.
Don’t worry about finding “your purpose”. Develop interests, WORK at interests, and the rest will come.
Broomstick answered this very well. There’s a world of difference between “trait you consider optimal” and “deal breaker”. If you, yourself, insist only on dating girls that meet all your preferences 100%, we have a problem.
This may be the most pathetically self-indulgent statement I’ve ever read, and you will find this funny in the fullness of time. Feeling sorry for yourself can be a sort of masturbation, and can be easily overdone.