You might be surprised! My uncle is 170 cm tall, his wife about 165, and two of their sons are about 170. Their third son is nearly 195 cm. Yes, he's their biological child - we've checked!

Both my aunt and uncle had tall fathers and very short mothers. Height is polygenic (multiple genes are responsible), so my cousin won the height allele lottery and inherited a higher proportion of the height increasing traits both parents carried, making him a height outlier.

I once knew a married couple with the husband at 6'8" and the wife at 4'10". For years, we all joked about them having kids, and either would quip "logistics". I was part of the family gathering during the birth of their first child, and a caesarian was essential. 🙃

I mean not neccesarily. Both my parents are at least 15cm shorter than me. My mum is quite tall (looking at averages she falls in the 20th percentile but still is around 175cm) but my dad is average height at 48th percentile. And yet I fall in the 1st to 2nd percentile.

Both my brothers are about as tall as my dad and the only one even close to my height is one of my mother's cousins.

Down bad

I don't know you, but she'd kill me if that happens. She's over 100kg in weight.

Yeah I’d sniff her farts too.

My aunt is fairly tall (about 1.9 meters) and she told me she was so thankful for men in drag becoming a thing in the zeitgeist, as she could finally find shoes and clothes her size with ease.

Useful until she needs to access anything mass-manufactured where height effects experience: cars, planes, cloths, beds, chairs, countertops, rakes, rollercoasters, etc.

Having sports where height is an advantage does not change that the world was designed at about 4/5th the scale of what would be comfortable. It can be tiresome after a few decades.

Most athletes make next to nothing. Like I worked with a 3 time Olympic track rider. At that level, the sport consumes your whole life just to complete at Olympics level. No one at the Olympics is making money at it. Everyone is broke and barely skating by. I worked with pro cycling teams and it was the same story for all, even many recognizable names are just poor people that love it in many cases. There are very very few big name celebrity types that actually make good money.

Autism is my superpower rofl.

Also good lord, 7 foot tall woman, sheesh.

I can only hope she doesn't have some kind of debilitating form of gigantism, I know a lot the all time world record holders for height had all kinds of horrendous health problems and died fairly young.

I am a 5'9" woman and prefer guys around my height, anecdotally all the women I know who want tall guys are themselves short.

It's a weak preference but yeah I think since I go through life being around the same height as most guys I meet I don't have such a strong association with height as a sex difference, if that makes sense.

I don't have access to the full article, but it sounds like they didn't examine the sliding scale of height preferences, by one's own height.

The 21cm vs 8cm is the mean, and their sample size was large enough to be statistically valid.

I did specifically quote the part that includes 'best satisfied'.

Ie, the 'ideal' partner height.

Many people often choose partners that are ... close enough to many ideal traits, weighting them in different and complex ways, often not even entirely fully concsious of the nature of how they weight or order their preferences, but thats all way outside of the scope of this paper.

Yep, its possible the uh preference differential changes as you approach extreme ends of height, but the problem is that, being a statistically representative sample, it doesn't include many people who are very short, or very tall.

Anyway:

https://annas-archive.org/md5/50413a744e4887cff238a542b59b19b2

Here's the whole paper!

But from the publicly available text, it doesn't seem to report on whether that preferred delta between one's own height and the ideal partner height changed with the absolute height of themselves.

Yeah, that seems to be my take away as well, they don't go into precisely that in the paper.

Or is there a sliding scale where already tall people aren't exactly looking for excessively unusual outliers, and that the preference of tall women is something smaller than 21cm, such that the overall average might be that very short women prefer a big height difference but very tall women prefer a small height difference?

Apologies for shit tier resolution, I am on mobile:

'Female' meaning, the male-preferred height of a female partner, 'Male' meaning the female-prefered height of a male partner, so that... may be backwards depending on your inution for reading graphs.

Also these are 2 SD bounds, 95% CI, I kinda cropped out half the text that explains that, whoops.

So, yes, this effect you mention does exist... but they do not seem to focus on it in the paper.

Unfortunately, I am not seeing a visualization that or equation that more specifically and precisely answers your question of whether or not very tall or short men or women are less uh, height-choosy.

Perhaps I am missing it?

....

Here's another way they visualize their data:

Now, here, 'Men' means men, 'Women' means women, and the x axis is [male height - female height].

So, very broadly, yeah you see that the sort of mutual sweet spot of both partners being decently satisfied with the height difference is roughly a man being 13ish cm, roughly 5 inches taller than a woman.

So, from that, maybe 'Short King' has a realistic shot with 4'10" women, not 4' 7"?

???

...

We can also see that women's satisfaction with a male partner's height uh, nose dives as a women is asked about a man who is going from 13 cm taller than them, to the same height as them... but then does rebound once the heights are just inverted.

This is also the only situation where the man is less satisfied with the pairing than the woman, on average, (untill you get to men being about 18cm taller than the woman, then its roughly the same gap as the height difference increases) but the men have huge CI intervals in this instance, indicating many men actually don't mind this much, and some men mind it extremely.

Meanwhile, women generally dislike being taller than their man, with a yes, expanded CI range, but far less than that of the man, indicating that this is a less variable and more common ... anti-preference for most women, in general, than it is for men.

...

Somewhat oddly, to me at least, we also have this pattern:

The maximum gap in partner height satisfaction between men and women seems to be around a man being just about 3cm, or about 1 inch, taller than the woman.

For women broadly, this is the least desirable possible pairing, while for men, it would basically be nice if they were about 2 inches or about 5cm taller..., but its not that big a deal to them, they are not that far from their maximum satisfaction.

Meanwhile, this situation is the lowest scoring situation for women.

It is actually worse than the woman being taller than the man.

In case you have not guesed, I am a guy, and I find this ... fairly confusing/interesting.

Basically this means there is a huge mismatch where guys are generally pretty ok with being just a bit taller than their gal, but women find this to be the worst, the lowest possible score they would broadly assign to a partner height difference situation, to such an extent that they'd actually be on average happier if her man was just actually shorter than her.

...

But anyway, yeah, unless I am missing something, it doesn't look like this paper actually answers your question precisely.

What you mention, the uh, height-choosyness tapering off for tall women and very short men does occur to some extent, but we... don't really seem to have that detailed to us, I am not seeing a way to mathematically compare the magnitude.

Also again worth noting, my 'Short King' scenario was kind of a worst case scenario, as it assumes all women would only go for their ideal partner scenario.

Some women do do this, but obviously not all, and some men also do this, but obviously not all... and numbers on the absolute or relative prevalence of that do not seem to be in this paper.

If he was the average male height of 5' 10"... she would be uh...

about 7' 6".

Which would make her the tallest woman in the world, by half a foot, as per uh, ColeSloth elsewhere in this thread showing that the tallest currently alive woman being 7' tall.

Derp!

Yep, whoops, take those figures and divide by two, I forgot to, damnit.

You forgot to factor in the hollow earth Mole Women. Or are they not considered 'people' now?

~= means approximately equal.

https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile-calculator.php

Going by this, and using 25 as the age, which is my guesstimate for the ages in the OP image, it seems to more precisely be ... 178.4cm.

Do you have an alternate dataset you find to be more accurate?

Oh yeah, being young would be great. I’d dunk on everyone.

I will clarify that being in my forties there’s no way that would be a good time.

Knees go quicker, especially for athletes

Why? Height doesn't automatically equate to back problems. Uneven weight distribution (belly, boobs, etc.), poor stretching habits, lack of excerise, bad posture/form/lifting, or injury equate to back problems at ANY height.

Nice how the metric system of the images says its either 206cm or 207cm and the imperial system is like maybe 6'9'' maybe 6'11''.

she's yuuuuge!