It doesn’t have to be expensive. We got married at the registry office for £200 or so, and had a barbecue in our garden afterwards. Living with someone else saves money, too.
It doesn’t have to be–but there’s tremendous pressure on folks for it to be, and that pressure can easily be internalized. The guy who won’t propose because he can’t afford the two month’s pay for a ring, the woman who won’t accept because she can’t afford the twenty thousand bucks for a “proper” wedding, are real.
Definitely true, but doesn’t require a marriage, or even a romantic/sexual partner.
At one school I went to, one of the students went to Horsemaster’s School* instead of an academic college. The staff was absolutely furious; she ruined their acceptance record.
Now there was a person with effort and staying power. She had a hell of a time convincing Horsemasters’ to accept her, because she was a polio survivor with no use of her left foot and almost none of her left hand. Who in high school was showing Morgans, and doing very well.
*I can’t find a link, except to shows and fiction that may or may not be about the right place. School in England, training people for professional work with dressage/saddle seat horses. Maybe it doesn’t exist any longer; this was the 1960’s. Or maybe I’m remembering some part of the name wrong.
But that sort of thing was easy for me, because I’d been trained to do it my whole previous life, and because academic learning in the fields I was in was easy for me. Any course I found really difficult I didn’t have to take.
I started off with it ingrained in me from high school that I needed to show up at class and do the reading and show up for exams. As it gradually sunk in to me that nobody was making me do anything, I got worse and worse at this; but it took long enough to wear off, and I was able to get enough courses I was actually interested in, that I graduated in good standing. But the only time management I had to do was showing up at exams and at enough classes to get by, and handing in papers (usually at the last minute); otherwise my only responsibilities were to get myself dressed and occasionally showered – and it wasn’t up to me to clean the shower, let alone to get the plumbing fixed if something went wrong with it, or to juggle a job and/or responsibilities to care for other people.
Hard to say. I never held a job that I needed one for. I’m glad for some of what I learned; whether I would have learned it elsewhere, I don’t know.
I preferred short men, though I’ve dated a tall one. I’ve known other women who prefer short, as well as some who didn’t care.
I don’t know where you got the stat. Did it ask how many men would date a fat woman, or (highly relevant) a woman taller than them?
They studied matches on online dating sites, using some math I absolutely don’t understand and will not vouch for.
But look at page 48. Here, they estimate how much more money a short man needs to earn than a 5’11" man in order to have an equal chance of getting a match. Their formula suggests that, in order for a 5’5" guy like myself (rounding up to 5’6" to keep in line with their data) to be as successful as a 5’11" guy, I’d need to earn $175,000 more than him.
I don’t think they look at weight as a separate category, although it’s a huge paper and I haven’t scoured it. They do consider “looks” as a category, though.
They also mention that male redheads (hi!) also have more trouble dating.
Honestly, this makes me feel better about myself. I always just figured I was shit at the social aspects of dating. Instead, I just had a much smaller pool of women who would find me attractive, due to factors outside of my control. Had I known that when I was single, it might have made things a lot more tolerable: I could’ve tried more explicitly to find women in that cohort.
It also makes me really glad I’m not single.
Marriage saves you money. Weddings can be expensive if you are a conspicuous- consumption extroverted romantic who is easily sold. That’s completely optional. You can go down to the courthouse and you’ll be just as married as if you spent 100 grand.
Religious conservatives have HIGHER rates of divorce than liberals. Although they marry more often, they stay married less. Probably correlated to the practices of marrying young, starting families early, and to lower education levels and lower income levels.
That seems like an implausible disparity. Most folks, regardless of height, earn far less than $175K. It seems to imply that even the most destitute of 5’11" guys are being absolutely mobbed by women.
Somehow I interpreted as meaning that even a very well off 5’5” guy gets no matches.
I don’t think that’s the meaning.
That’s close to my takeaway. Rather, the well-off 5’5" guy gets very few matches compared to the average-wealth 5’11" guy.
Example scenario:
Bob is 5’11". Steve is 5’6".
Bob earns $75,000. On the dating app, for every 50 attempts to match, he matches 5 times.
Steve earns $75,000. On the dating app, for every 50 attempts to match, he matches 1 time.
If Steve earned $250,000, he would match 5 times, same as Bob.
Sorry I don’t see the correlation here. There’s not much someone can do about their height. There are multiple things someone can do about their income, their attitudes towards a mate’s income, and their desire or ability to contribute non-financially but beneficially to a relationship.
Cohabiting saves money. Marriage saves a little at the margins, e.g., with taxes, but even then there are ways around that.
But I’m not talking about perfect economic actors. I’m talking about real people and why there might be real disparities in marriage by wealth levels, in a culture that pressures couples into insane wedding expenses.
The American wedding cult is a side issue. Maybe a few people get divorced because the debt incurred sent them into a downward spiral but not so many as to affect statistics.
You’re right, and it’s not a good thing if people are cohabiting instead because they can’t afford a grand wedding. It means they don’t get the legal protections of making their relationship official.
Lmao. Good for her.
It’s not so easy for everyone. I did minimal work in secondary school and never did my homework, because I was bored and depressed, and my parents were too busy getting acrimoniously divorced to make me put any effort in. I got bad grades as a result, but thankfully did well enough in the subjects I enjoyed that I still got into a sixth form to do A levels. I finally started working there, because for the first time in my life I was actually challenged (I even got to do extra maths classes after school for fun), but it’s harder to learn to work hard at 16.
IDK, maybe that even helped at university since I knew if I didn’t make myself attend lectures and do the assignments, no one else was going to. But I bet the early training you had was more helpful. And I had one friend who dropped out and got a job delivering pizza (he wasn’t doing too well last time I heard from him 
), and two more who stopped going to lectures in second year when we were living off campus. They barely scrapped third-class degrees. Some people when they realise no one is making them do anything just… stop.
I’m very happy I went for social reasons. I didn’t fit in at all in school, but I made good friends at university, had a decent social life for the first time, and (back on the topic of the thread) met some smart, nerdy young men who wanted to date me and who I wanted to date. 
I’ve dated men between my height (5’6") and 6’4". I don’t care much about height in general, but it’s true I wouldn’t want to date a guy who was significantly shorter than me.
From what I’ve heard about modern dating, this is very optimistic. According to Google, the average man gets 1 match for 140 swipes right on Tinder, and numbers would be even worse for poor Steve. Young people need to get off the apps and start meeting people in real life again.
Totally–I was pulling the numbers out of a hat to explain what I think the study is showing. Change 5 out of 50 to 1 out of 140 for Bob, and that’s what Steve’s additional $175,000 income would help him reach.
Agreed that people need to get out more. But I think the height dynamic would be exacerbated in real-world spaces, if anything.
Here’s the thing, part of what I cited, and of many other articles: it is assortive both ways. Men, statistically, prefer a woman on the same footing or a bit less (accomplished but less than they, less tall than they are but in the same rough percentiles …) Women, statistically, the converse (accomplished ideally a bit more than they are, taller but not very much so in percentiles than they are.
Individuals are not statistics. A very short woman may like ‘em over six feet tall. Same with what part of the package matters most, which proxy for power triggers attraction most (height, income, confidence).
But people tend to those patterns relative to themselves.
Totally agreed with all that. It’s just a subset of the bleedin’ obvious generalization that some people have an easier time coupling up than others. I’ve dated multiple women, and married one, who were just fine with a carrot-topped shortie. But I probably had a harder time dating than I would have had I been 6’ tall with brown hair. Which, shrug, you win some, you lose some.
At this point, though, I think that if all agree on the bleedin’ obvious generalization, the bit about height preferences has run its course.
The bleedin’ obvious should also be just as much so regarding the aspects that were of the OP though.
Height is a cross culturally firmly wired possibly subconscious proxy for “power” in terms of male attractiveness to females. Income/wealth and other metrics of being “accomplished” (including education level) are also ways to assess power. “Power is an aphrodisiac” mainly works for men, not for women as well. With Swift and Beyoncé as noted exceptions. Generally women prefer to connect with (and here I’ll include both the short term fling to long term partner connections, which may operate by different assessments) men who score higher than they do on the power metrics combine. Equal is okay. But under is a compromise.
But either of them only needs one successful match.
And I suspect that, even now, a lot of people get matched up by means other than dating apps; and that dating app selections are strongly affected by what people think they’re attracted to, and are told is attractive; whereas IRL connections are often made between people who don’t match such expectations.
That was exactly my point.
It’s not possible to assume that because somebody graduated college that they had more staying power and put in more effort than someone who didn’t graduate or didn’t even go to college – because the amount of staying power and effort required to do so varies drastically from person to person.
Somebody who put in a whole lot more effort and had a lot more staying power than I did might have flunked out, or not made it to college in the first place, because it was a lot harder for them than it was for me.
And someone whose aim didn’t include going to college, or stopped doing so after starting, might have put a whole lot more effort with a whole lot more staying power into doing something else than many people who do graduate college put into graduating.
Not necessarily. The back of the head tends to associate height with ability; but some short people (also some tall people, of course) exude ability in person in a fashion that’s very difficult to express on a dating app.
Yes. Confidence and quick wittedness are also, I think, power proxies.
Absolutely. But a person with an ingrained advantage (not too tall for a woman, not too short for a man) with wit and charm is going to have an easier go of it than a person without that advantage.
Right–and the taller man, and the shorter woman, have an easier time getting that one successful match.
Just about everything is easier for some people than for others.
Complaining that the problem is primarily one’s height only decreases one’s chances further. Complaining that an entire gender is only interested in people of a given height is likely to reduce them to close to nonexistent.