Finding Mr. or Ms. Right is a complicated process, and choosing a mate may involve compromising - well, maybe on trivial things, like whether or not having kids is important or on being different religions or races. Height preference seems to be a hard stop for many, according to a paper published January 16th in PLOS ONE by Gert Stulp and other psychologists from the University of Groningen, Netherlands who suggest that despite the many other factors involved, people's preferences for a partner's height are accurately reflected in real couples in the UK.
You are not surprised? Read on.
Given the average heights of men and women in typical Western populations, two out of every hundred couples should comprise a woman who is taller than her male companion. However, such couples are seen much less frequently than this.
Previous surveys of college undergraduates appearing in psychology journals show that men generally prefer to pair with women shorter than themselves, and women prefer men who are taller than they are. However, short women and tall men appear to prefer larger height differences with their partner, whereas tall women and short men prefer smaller differences in height. It seems unfair to make tall women date shorter men, but things happen and if petites get the tall men also, that is love for you.
These trends have previously been studied only in terms of preferences or expectations, the authors say. In the current paper, the authors seek to analyze to what extent these preferences translate into actual partner choices. Their survey results suggest that all of these trends do exist in a sample of over 10,000 couples in the UK, and the difference in height between a man and woman in a couple tends to be less than 8 inches.
However, the patterns observed in actual couples were not seen as frequently as would be expected based on people's preferences from previous studies.
According to the authors, the results suggest that "while preferences for partner height generally translate into actual pairing, they do so only modestly."