I’m 71 inches tall — five-foot-eleven, for those of you who don’t want to do the math, or 1.8 meters for those of you who live in countries that use a normal system of measurement. But I wasn’t always. I used to be 73 inches — six-foot-one, 1.85 meters. In 2009, though, I had major spinal surgery, and as a result I lost a couple of inches of height. Five-eleven is still fairly tall, but it doesn’t put me over six feet anymore. My partners are all fine with my height — both the short ones and the tall one — and honestly I’ve never had an issue with a partner who was unhappy that I was the height that I am.

On Fetlife, user Spreadsheetz wrote recently about height, and how he’s only five-foot-three (160 centimeters). He pointed out that, on a lot of dating sites, women will say they don’t want anything to do with men under a certain height. He says (emphasis in original):

Ultimately, experts say that the height preference is a thing that most people have but actually cannot articulate why. When questioned directly about it, they share a response that even THEY consider a poor reason to discriminate on height. So it’s all about perception, right?

I used to have a boss who was five-foot-five (165 centimeters)*. He had a touch of small-man syndrome, but overall he was a pretty decent boss. He was married, with a child, and I think his wife was taller than him. She was clearly fine with it. But they met in the days before dating apps (he was my boss in 2003 or so), when you could go out and meet people and charm them, as opposed to having to impress them with a poorly-written profile and a picture of yourself taken in the bathroom mirror. I don’t go on the dating apps anymore, but when I did I never mentioned my height because so many women seemed to want men who were six feet or taller, and I just wasn’t that tall anymore. I wanted a chance to get to know them, instead of them rejecting me outright just because I didn’t meet some arbitrary measurement that they didn’t even understand the reason for its importance.** I ended up dating three people off dating sites — two from OKC and one from Tinder. One of them is Partner 1. Another was average height for a woman. The third was, if I’m remembering correctly, five-foot-ten (178 centimeters). All three of these relationships had their pluses and minuses in the early days, but none of them were related to my height.

I idly wonder if things might have been different if I was, say, three inches shorter (about 7.5 centimeters).

My dad is shorter than my mom by about an inch, but in their wedding pictures (which were taken in the 1970s) he seems taller than her. I don’t know if he was standing on a step, or wearing heels, or if he lost some height over the years while she didn’t. But it’s rare to see any wedding picture where the man is shorter than the woman. I bet photographers just know how the pictures “should” be composed.

I have some characters in the holiday stories who have a five-inch (12-ish centimeter) height differential — the woman is the taller one. I don’t know if I’m going to have them get married or not; the relationship has only been going on for a few months. But I’m curious if a wedding photographer would stage the photos so he looked taller than her. My guess is yes. And all because, in America (and some other parts of the world), if you’re a man and you’re not six feet tall, something is apparently wrong with you.

Though I can’t figure out what yet.

* Are you starting to get tired of me posting the metric equivalent? If the US would get off its ass and start being more logical… but then I laugh, because this country is anything but.

** I’m aware that was a poorly-worded sentence. Just go with it.