4 days ago
You can pay Tinder to find matches of a certain height. But why do we care so much?
In her Tinder bio, Natasha Burns would tantalize potential matches with a few words: 'Probably taller than you.'
Men readily slid into the model's DMs ready to compare heights. When they found out she was 6 feet, 5 inches tall, though, many of them balked.
'I found most men would be okay with me in the setting of their own home or hanging out without people around,' she said. 'When it's seen publicly, it's a little bit more humiliating, I guess.'
Burns is 6 inches taller than her now-husband, whom she met on Tinder. But if either of them had been able to filter their potential matches by height, it's possible the two would have written each other off based on measurements alone.
Tinder is testing a feature that lets paying users set height preferences for potential partners, with the goal of matching singles whose desired height ranges align. Other dating apps already offer versions of this setting.
Single men on the shorter side almost immediately condemned the test setting: Surely, women would use it to filter them out completely, they protested.
The filter doesn't quite work that way — a Tinder spokesperson said the height setting won't block singles from being seen by users with different preferences — but it will influence the recommendations the app makes.
'We're always listening to what matters most to our Tinder users — and testing the paid height preference is a great example of how we're building with urgency, clarity, and focus,' Phil Price Fry, Tinder's vice president of communications, told CNN in a statement.
A potential partner's height really is that important to many singles on the digital prowl. Research shows that heterosexual women prefer to date taller men, while men commonly report seeking women who are shorter than them.
But dating apps have likely exacerbated our well-studied fixation on height in a potential partner, said Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor at Arizona State University who studies how online dating affects modern love.
'They're seeing people as their height,' she said of dating app users. 'They're seeing the ability to filter it, so suddenly height becomes salient in a way that it wasn't before. In doing that, the dating apps are telling you what you should be prioritizing.'
Knowing what you like in a potential partner is important, she said. But the narrower your idea of the perfect match becomes, the harder it can be to find them in real life.
Most dating apps allow (paying, premium) users to filter for their ideal match. They can set their desired age range, political affiliation, substance use, even intentions for using the app — are they looking for short-term fun or a love that lasts?
Other apps have introduced similar height filters (though Tinder remains the most popular among them — at least 14% of American adults have used it, per Pew Research Center). But even before users could specify that they're looking for a guy in finance, trust fund, 6-foot-5, blue eyes, many singles felt 'compelled to put (height) in their profile,' Sharabi said.
'Maybe they think that it's something that's going to make them especially attractive,' she said. 'Then other people see it and feel like, 'oh, I should be putting this in my profile, too.''
The height obsession often leads to deception, she said, and filters might even 'encourage' some singles to fudge their heights so they appear in front of more users.
'They might think, 'What's an inch? No one's gonna notice that,'' she said. 'People feel like they don't have any other choice.'
Well-meaning shorter men won't be filtered out completely through the new Tinder feature — the popular TikToker iPadTinderGirl set her height filter between 6 feet and 7 feet, 11 inches, and the first user she encountered after that was still under 6 feet tall.
'It's not a guarantee that these people aren't going to get shown to you, but at the same time, you're nudging the algorithm in a certain direction, right?' Sharabi said.
Though the conversation around dating app discrimination can quickly slide, among some aggrieved singles, into misogynistic territory, shorter men are likely at a disadvantage on the apps, Sharabi said.
A 2013 study found that a partner's height matters more strongly to straight women than it does to men (though men have been shown to prefer shorter partners, natch). There are also typically more men on dating apps than women — Pew found that 50% of men in 2022 reported having used dating apps in the last year compared to 37% of women — so women are able to be more discerning, Sharabi said.
It isn't only the 'short kings' that Sharabi worries about. Tall women could find themselves facing fewer matches with height filters, she said.
'I don't know why society has to perceive 'feminine' as being petite,' Burns said. 'I feel very feminine as a super tall woman.'
There's nothing inherently wrong with preferring tall men as a short woman, or vice versa, Sharabi said — we like what we like. But those preferences are at least subconsciously influenced by society's perceived norms of dainty women and strong, dominant men.
'We tend to equate height with things like power and status,' she said. '(Height preferences) are coming from some of these pretty highly gendered expectations that we have for what our relationship dynamics should look like.'
Dating biases are easier to disregard when two people meet offline and just click. But filters allow us to act on those biases before giving a chance to anyone who doesn't meet our requirements, Sharabi said.
'Filters remove a little bit of that serendipity,' she said.
Before meeting someone through online dating became de rigueur, the apps were designed to be 'equalizers' that could connect singles in thin dating markets with a galaxy of potential matches, she said.
Now, filtering has made it easy to search for a hyper-specific, ideal match — not so easy, though, to find them.
'People come into it with a wishlist of things they're looking for,' she said. 'And at a certain point, it almost becomes like you're shopping.'
Twitch streamer Charlie Schroeder enraged many users when she weighed in on the 'wishlist' element on X:
'Not to side with the men here, but why do women 5'3' and under have such strong preferences for men 6ft+. you are a hobbit, 5'8' is tall enough. you can't even tell when your 5'8' boyfriend is lying about being 6'0' because you're so short.'
Hobbits aside, Schroeder said she's noticed the '6-foot fixation' has only become more pronounced among single women she knows through the ubiquity of dating apps.
'People kind of become metrics on dating apps,' Schroeder told CNN. 'They're a set of data that you try to figure out if you're attracted to. A random number — 6 feet — became important because it signaled something -– attractiveness, masculinity.'
Focusing on an arbitrary measurement, she said, might 'foreclose some potential relationships,' she said.
'(Height) says nothing,' she said. 'It doesn't indicate anything about your ability to truly connect with someone.'
Schroeder and Burns both said height doesn't matter to them in a prospective partner — Schroeder, who has given up on using Tinder, tends to date shorter guys and taller women almost accidentally, she said. Burns is happily married to a shorter man who doesn't mind that his wife has several inches on him.
Dating apps may incentivize pickiness — and certainly, filters help users avoid matching with someone whose politics or lifestyles are incompatible — but singles who want to improve their chances of finding someone kind, who makes them laugh and shares their interests, might consider putting a little less emphasis on how tall that person is.
'People who are judging compatibility based on height might just miss out on some really great people for things that they wouldn't notice if they were to meet them,' Sharabi said.
