Tired of having a sore neck from looking down at your girlfriend or of having to stand on your tiptoes to be able to kiss your boyfriend? Well, turns out it’s all worth it in the long run, as a study has shown short woman and tall men make the happiest couples.
It’s known that in a lot of cases women prefer tall men, but it turns out it’s for more reasons than just being able to mimic Thor Bjornsson – better known as Game of Thrones’ Gregor Clegane – and his teeny, tiny wife.
Researcher Kitae Sohn said:
Although it has been known that women prefer tall men in mating for evolutionary reasons, no study has investigated whether a taller husband makes his wife happier.
I mean – I’m sure ‘evolutionary reasons’ isn’t the first thing on a woman’s mind when she’s dating a taller guy, but we’ll go with it.
The study, which Sohn undertook after realising there wasn’t a study on a woman’s happiness in regards to the height difference between the couple, used nationally representative Indonesian data.
The findings reveal:
A greater height difference in a couple was positively related to the wife’s happiness. This relationship gradually weakened over time and entirely dissipated by 18 years of marital duration. The husband’s resourcefulness was a minor mediator in the relationship.
We thus argue that the husband’s height and its correlation made his wife initially happy, but their influence waned over time. Nevertheless, the long period of the dissipation indicates a powerful impact of male height on women’s psychology, probably prepared by evolution.
Basically guys – yes your height may help you with the ladies and initially make them happy, but you’ve also eventually got to pull your finger out and be a good boyfriend too; there’s only so long you can ride the tall guy wave.
According to other studies, taller men have better leadership skills as well, further making them more attractive to their female suitors.
There’s also the idea taller (and therefore bigger) men are stronger, again making women more attracted to them.
In an 2013 article in Psychology Today, Professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne said:
Evolutionary speaking, one might argue that a tall man would be preferred by women because, if you follow the argument, he’ll be stronger and better able to ward off physical threats to his family. However, unless taller equals stronger, faster, and smarter, height wouldn’t seem to offer any particularly unique advantage.
Taller men may only seem stronger because we conflate height with weight and strength. And being “looked up to,” quite literally, may at some subconscious level lead taller men to feel that they have superior qualities.
So, if some tall guys’ egos weren’t already sky high (pun intended), I’m sure the above will further push it through the roof (sorry, I’ll stop now).
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Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.