GSOH, SBS

I was surprised to read a "lifestyle" piece in the Guardian recently, in which the online dating woes of short men were highlighted:

When Tinder recently said that it was trialling a feature that allows some premium users to filter potential matches by height, it quickly proved controversial. “Oh God. They added a height filter,” lamented one Reddit thread, while an X user claimed: “It’s over for short men.”

It seems short men – I'm not sure how tall you have to be, these days, to count as "short" – are worried that women on dating sites will always favour tall men. They may be right; I really don't know who uses these dating apps, or why.

Now, I am a little over 5' 6" (168 cm), which is short enough to raise an eyebrow if you are a leading-man actor like Tom Cruise, but nowhere near short enough to be of any concern in real life. I have always been aware of my height, and would not have minded being taller – I have often joked that I am a tall man trapped in a short man's body – but it had never seemed to me an inherent disadvantage in life. Although it is true that with age I may actually be getting shorter, both absolutely and relatively.

Absolutely, because it seems that, at 71, I have lost some of my peak adult height. I'm afraid to say I did get quite, um, short with the nurse who revealed this fact to me recently. Check your calibration, madam! I am a full half an inch taller than that! Sadly, though, that seems not to be the case any more. I'm shrinking, dammit.

Relatively, because some of the young folk are getting really bloody tall these days, aren't they? I mean, I may always have been a little bit short for a man, but I never felt truly tiny until recently, for example when standing in a queue between strapping young students, so many of them measuring around or in many cases well over six foot. Is this class, Darwin, or diet, I wonder? One thing is for sure, though, it is not the result of self-belief or the power of prayer; to adapt an old saying, if wishes were inches then short men would play basketball. So perhaps it is a consequence of this inevitably unevenly-distributed generational growth spurt – the UK average height of males is still just 5' 9" and females a surprising 5' 3" – that height seems more of a cause of anxiety to young men now than it was in my younger days.

That "tall" and "short" are essentially relative terms was first made clear to me around 1980, when we visited California (the one on the West Coast of America, not the one on the East Coast of England), and then Spain's Basque Country. We were in Oakland staying with friends, and in the Bay Area I had a preview of what now seems to be becoming our national future, both height-wise and girth-wise. Extremely tall people towered over us everywhere, often combined with truly shocking obesity. It seemed that Americans might be expanding to fill the available space on their still largely empty continent. By contrast, holidaying among the compact Basques I regularly had the heady experience of being the tallest man in the bar. It was all a bit like Gulliver's Travels or perhaps Alice in Wonderland and, like those books, a Great Teaching. 

But to return to the concerns of that Guardian piece. My dating days were in the 1970s, and conducted entirely by "face time" at venues like local youth clubs, parties, and their equivalents at university. There was no other way: if you wanted to try your hand at romance, you had to leave the house, and put your trust in the serendipity of proximity. It never occurred to me then that my height might in any way be a handicap in the dating stakes. And, as it turned out, it wasn't: from age 15 until I finally met my match life-partner at university I "went out", as we used to say, with a series of attractive and life-enhancing young women, for periods of anything from a couple of months to an entire year. True, they did mainly happen to be shorter than me, but then most women were, and self-evidently still are; it simply wasn't an issue.

In fact, now I think back, nearly all of the other lads in my circle who were popular with the girls were also on the short side, including one so devilishly handsome that girls used to follow him home (so he said, anyway) and another notorious rake-in-training who had been hit with a paternity suit early on in his "dating" career and who was a good inch shorter than me. No, it was generally the taller, sporty, and hyper-masculine types who had a problem, not us. Possibly because they seemed to think that what girls liked was to be stared at wordlessly in a brooding, quasi-cannibalistic manner – pretty much the equivalent of a heavy-breathing phone call – or relentlessly teased and belittled like some annoying younger sister.

Which reminds me of one of the earliest posts in this blog – an answer to the question When were you happiest? – in which I describe how my then girlfriend (for a whole unforgettable year!) and two of her classmates made their way across town from the girls' grammar to the boys' grammar during their lunch break to surprise me on my 17th birthday with a cake and a kiss in full view of a sixth-form common room of envious boys. Hah! Few things could ever rival that. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over. What's "short" got to do with it?

Chasing girls...

Not sure I'm enjoying this as much as I'd expected...

But things have changed in recent decades, of course. The internet and social media have poisoned the well when it comes to dating. The very idea of someone sitting alone in a room and scrolling through lists of potential partners based on nothing more than an over-groomed, quite possibly drastically-edited photograph combined with a bit of formulaic self-description is deeply depressing, not to say alarming. Apparently those quaint, essentially space-saving acronyms that used to figure in the "lonely hearts" columns in the papers – things like GSOH ("good sense of humour" or sometimes "good salary, own house") – have now evolved into creepy semi-secret handshakes such as ENM ("ethical non-monogamy") and ONS ("one night stand"), not to mention various others indicating quite specialised sexual preferences. Seriously? On a first date?

Even when not actually a disguised invitation to meet a kinky psychopath – how could you possibly know? – it all seems a bit soulless and robotic, more reminiscent of a takeaway menu than Saturday night at the village-hall dance. Perhaps the fear that women will always choose the tall men over the short men with nothing going for them beyond GSOH is not so unrealistic. Hmm, think I'll have the perfectly-groomed six-footer with ENM and a side of fancy car this weekend, please! But then I imagine if "chest size" or "weight" were mandatory many women would be similarly alarmed, too.

But, wait... Surely young people as attractive and sophisticated as you and I once were (or at least thought we were) don't resort to dating apps, any more than we used to frequent those vulgar venues that used to be known as "cattle markets"? We're taking about those other people here, aren't we? The boring beige people, the normies, the Kevins and Karens, whatever you want to call them?

TBH I have no idea who uses these apps. Kinky psychopaths aside, I suppose quite a few will be opportunists seeking ONS hookups or a bit of ENM with some GGG type ("good, giving, and game"). But I imagine the more sincere customers are likely to be the lonely ones who emerged from their teens and early adult years without finding The One; the desperate ones who thought they had found The One, only to find themselves single again in mid-life; and the too-choosy ones who just never knew how to accept that This One would do very nicely as The One, thank you very much. Plus, of course, the very ordinary, not necessarily short men who have been convinced by porn and "manosphere" influencers that they should settle for nothing less than some compliant trophy WAG-alike, and who will eventually despair of "relationships" and sink into an angry sulk of incel misogyny. There are apps for them, too.

In retrospect, one of the nicest things about the 1970s for many of us was the elevation of scruffiness into a fashion statement, at least for that cohort interested in all things counter-cultural and probably headed for higher education in one form or another. It took the pressure off appearance, and put the emphasis on character, wit, and intelligence. At least, that's how it seemed in the sixth-form common room of Alleyne's School, Stevenage, in February 1971. Hah! For a while, the nerds became the Cool Kids.

But, as that prime nerd Darwin proposed, and as today's shorter young men clearly fear, it is female preferences, however capricious, that drive reproductive behaviour and hence evolution, with sometimes bizarre consequences. I mean, do you honestly think that male peacocks chose to drag that ridiculous tail around? And check out those poor evolutionary fashion victims, the male birds of paradise. Crazy stuff! Regression to the mean may be a useful concept in statistical analysis, but clearly doesn't much apply in the long game of evolution.

So when it comes to the possible effects of dating apps on the future of our species it is – as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai said of (the wrong) French Revolution in 1972 – too soon to tell. But you might wonder, given the way things seem to be going in these days of the Anthropocene, whether a GSOH and a compact size (call it SBS, maybe? "Short but sturdy"...) may yet be traits worth selecting for. Tall? Not so much, big boss man.

1972: natural selection at work in Stevenage

("None of the above, but thanks for your interest...")

I was saddened to learn that Martyn Cornell (2nd from the right behind the bath in the photo) died suddenly and unexpectedly earlier in June. Martyn was a journalist for most of his working life [1], but his lifelong interest in beer, its history, economics, and sociology, led him to a certain renown within that community, and his latter years were a continual round of invitations to international festivals and brewery events, giving papers at conferences, blogging (Zythophile), and publishing. He died just one week before the publication of his latest book, a definitive history of the porter and stout varieties of beer. Martyn loved a controversy, and liked nothing more than to carry out thorough research in primary sources in order to bust various myths and misunderstandings repeated thoughtlessly in lesser writing about beer and brewing. Actually, no, that's not true: he liked nothing better than drinking good beer and eating good food. Cheers, old friend! Hope the afterlife beers are to your liking...

1. Martyn has a solid claim to have come up with the headline FOOT HEADS ARMS BODY when a sub-editor at The Times. See the discussion at Quote Investigator.