20-07-2025
I'm a 5ft man – this is what happens when I go online dating
In the dating world's endless war against the elf-proportioned, this summer has thrown in yet another love grenade. Tinder, the popular dating app, has started trialling a new height filter which allows 'Premium' users to select how tall their potential matches will be.
As an ever-fattening 5ft bundle of bachelordom, this specifically wounds me – because it reminds me of the pain of my first forays into online dating in the Noughties.
In the pre-app era, I joined one of the embryonic dating websites that asked what minimum and maximum height you were up for dating. I built a profile, pressed something that went ping and waited for women to want me. Only to get an email from the dating website itself explaining that while they were successful at matching people across the world, they could not find me a match and wished me success on more tailored websites.
What was even more humiliating was, when faced with the metric 'how far will you travel for love?', I had actually slid the filter to the far right – specifying that I would travel to anywhere on the planet.
To this day, I picture an Andean mountain-woman riding side-saddle on an overloaded donkey, puffing on a small wooden pipe, and looking down at her precariously balanced laptop seeing my profile, and breezily exhaling 'nah'.
I actually think what brought me no results was that dastardly height filter. Because even a friendly female laid-back about height probably would have thought most men would hit maybe the 5ft 3in mark if forced to pick a number. So even if said females generously finger-tipped to that cut-off point, they would still be missing out on that rich seam of really, really short men – Danny DeVito, Prince and me.
Perhaps, though, a height filter could save me from the indignity of the horrific, non-height-curated dates I have been on over the years. One date, upon seeing me approaching, simply slapped her palms on the restaurant table, eyed me up and down and made a scoffing sound, gesturing towards me with a honking 'Come off it!' as if I was part of a hidden camera prank, and that Ant and Dec would suddenly burst from behind me revealing that I wasn't a real date but just a clever animatronic puppet.
She was genuinely so incensed that I didn't dare sit down, and instead leant against the side of the table like a hostage negotiator, whispering delicately, 'I did specify 5ft 0in in my profile...' to which she bellowed, 'Yeah! But come on!' as if she was philosophically offended that out of all the 5ft 0in that I could come as, I had chosen this 5ft 0in…
To be honest, what she and other dates didn't know was that, for the purposes of that flurry of dates, I was secretly trying to be 5ft 2in, having – in lieu of yet purchasing my first proper pair of Cuban heels – stuffed my shoes with loo paper.
This turned out to be a false dawn, because with every trip to the lavatory between courses I actually got shorter throughout the evening, due to a mixture of sweaty-date feet and poor-quality Andrex-equivalency.
I think one date scarpered before pudding for fear I would shrink to nothing and become one with the universe before the bill came.
So maybe Tinder's new function shouldn't leave me crying into my crème brûlée, because on these dates a height filter function would have helped rather than hindered.
What's more, could the filter allow me to eliminate any taller matches, so I can finally slow dance with someone shorter than me? At 152cm, and having a mild form of dwarfism, I am totally up for my significant other being a full-blown little person. But being subtly outside the little people community, I simply don't know how to search for 'dwarf dating' without it appearing to be a fetish thing rather than a decent desire of the diminutive dater.
After all, Tinder's filter only makes short kings like me invisible to those who would have said a hard no anyway, despite our best chat-up lines and blinding charisma.
What the height filter story has also exposed is how little the media and mankind's conversation about height has altered.
Most short men articles have a photo of Tom Holland (now), Jamie Cullum (in the Noughties) and Billy Joel (always), and explain how well they're doing/they did/they've done with their unconventionally taller partners. And every time I see that, I die a little. To me, it would be as daft as if every report on a war contained a photo of the ridiculously pretty Kent villages of Sissinghurst, Elham and Ickham and came with the caption: 'These three locations have never experienced any overnight barrages from enemy weapons.' It's irrelevant, and misses the point.
When I think of disadvantaged dinky folk, I don't think of millionaire actors and musicians. I don't think of Billy Joel. I think of my mate Barry who works on and off as a retail security guard, and is so short shoplifters fend him off by applying a single hand to the top of his head, schoolyard style.
Or I think of Kev the karaoke king (in northern seaside towns, there are still such things), who daren't get out of his DJ box and go to the toilet during a gig, in case the girls swooning over his strong song selection see how short he is outside his seated booth area.
Or my longest-serving pal from junior school, Lennie, who thought a woman he'd been chatting to online had finally accepted his Prince-proportioned body. Out of the blue, she said she was coming to see him at the weekend. But then he read the last line of her message - 'PS. Can I park my car in your drive?' - and realised she was only interested in the proximity of his home to a Lana Del Ray concert.
It is us, the non-celeb short men, who are in danger of both literal and digital extinction. We are the Zelenskys of the dating pool – through no fault of our own, and despite having kind eyes, we just don't have the cards. And it's unfair and it's hard. But it's also biological, it's cultural and it's honest. At the age of 55, I am utterly divided by these two ways of looking at what I call the problem of 'height privilege'.
When I see Love Island 's lady contestants being able to say openly 'my type is tall, dark, good morals, good bants', I celebrate that their speech is uninhibited and utterly un-self-censored.
But they always lead with 'tall', without a moment's hesitation, which makes me sad for me, or rather for my 25-year-old self, who might have stood before these girls, silently and pointlessly, like a Squid Game non-speaking actor.
Having something about you that you can't change – and you should love – ridiculed and often proven to be a viscerally unattractive characteristic is always going to hurt, especially when the short man is in their late-teens and 20s.
But now that I've put my disco jeans and height-elevating shoes away, and settled down into lifelong bachelordom, you see the many virtues of being short. Beyond nonsense such as VAT-free shoes, leg space on planes and never hitting the top of my head on anything ever, there are real spiritual goodies – the joy of being the centre of attention in any context; the kindness of strangers; the ability to see things, problems and others differently and compassionately. All grown from my lack of growth.
