Short Guys 5''4'' How Is Your Dating Life In Usa

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Many years ago, before I fell in love with a short guy, I was one of the many American women who only had eyes for the tall ones. I'm sure you're familiar with the situation — I salivated over any dude who was over six feet, even though, at 5' 2', being with a tall guy just meant that trying to kiss each other while standing up was not unlike trying to parallel park a compact car. But I believed the tall guy hype anyway.

The shorter men I’ve dated (some as short as 5’5) and I share a similar problem, we’re seen as less desirable. Lots of men don’t want a woman taller or as tall as they are because they want to see their woman as fragile baby dolls and lots of women want a man taller than them so they can feel like they’re dating someone who’s big. The whole Northern Hemisphere will experience the winter solstice today, but the farther north you get, the more obvious it'll be. In high-latitude areas like here in Siberia, the sun's arc cuts especially low across the sky as winter sets in.

And I was far from the only woman who found herself drawn to tall dudes for reasons she never quite thought through. A 2012 survey of college students found that 89 percent of women were only interested in partners taller than them (while 47 percent of men were open to dating a woman who was taller them). 48 percent of women dating online are only interested in men who are taller than them, and a study of online dating in the New York City area found that men who fell below the average American male height of 5'9' typically had a less than five percent chance of having women reach out to them. The man is the shorter partner in only four percent of heterosexual pairings.

Why? If you ask any height-obsessed woman — or me, a decade ago — they'll probably feed you some line about a tall man making them feel 'safe' or 'tiny.' But let's unpack that for a second. What are we saying when we say we want a big man to make us feel tiny? Are we saying that we believe that it's sexually ideal that women take up as little space as possible, that we're at our most attractive when we look itty bitty compared to our male partner? You don't need a women's studies degree to know that that's whack. Also, I have a women's studies degree and I say it's whack. Being obsessed with men's height — in a way that you'd never obsess about any other one of their qualities — is bad for women, bad for dating, and reinforces a society that says physical traits we can't control are more important than who we really are or what we achieve.

As someone who falls two inches short of the average female height, I never even thought that dating a guy my height was an option worth thinking about. But I'm glad I did. Today, I'm about to celebrate my fifth anniversary with a wonderful dude who is roughly my height, and I would like you to know that height ain't nothing but a number. But if you need more convincing, please read on for 11 reasons to consider letting a short dude into your life/heart/vagina.

(And yes, all of the GIFS below feature male celebrities who are 5'8' or shorter. Free your minds, people!)

1. Kissing is less awkward

You'll never again have to engage in that weird orchestrated moment of stretching and bending, where you can't really enjoy the kiss because you're on your tiptoes and your super-tall dude is hunched over at a weird angle, and everyone involved is about to develop a hernia. When you date a guy who's around the same height as you, a kiss can just be a kiss, no step stools or pulley systems required.

2. You run into fewer sexual positioning problems

I had a long relationship with a dude who was 6'2' — a whole foot taller than me. When we stood side-by-side, his penis was about even with my abdomen, which made sex exactly as awkward as you'd imagine. Trying to reconcile height disparities while boning involved a lot of crouching on unstable structures made out of stacked pillows and crawling around on tables, trying to use my D+ in high school Geometry to make all the angles line up. With a short dude, there's no problem — all your parts align, and you're free to get creative, instead of spending all your time just trying to get your genitals on the same visual plane.

3. There is no correlation between height and penis size

Seriously. Trust me. Or don't! Trust this 1993 study, published in the way-too-entertaingly-titled Annals of Sex Research, which found that there was basically no connection between height and penis size. But also, seriously, trust me. No connection at all.

4. Short guys have more sex

A recent study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found that guys under 5'9' had sex more often than their taller counterparts. Who knows why? Are they all having sex with me? Is that it? (I'm not free to release that information, sorry)

5. If you're short, short guys can empathize with your small-person problems

I am a person with many hobbies and interests, but I will freely admit to you that the majority my life is about how I can't ever reach anything that's located on a top shelf at the grocery store. When I was dating around, I found the idea of dating a super-tall guy who had never had to ask a sales associate to help him get a box of Cap'n Crunch down exotic; but I'm glad that I settled down with someone who gets me on every level — including the level where I'm in a constant state of rage about how all jeans are too long for my legs.

6. You won't have to give up heels

When I met my boyfriend, I assumed that he'd be sensitive about the height thing, and resigned my extensive and expensive heel collection to the back of my closet, switching them out for Converse and flats. But soon after we got together, he asked why I had so many heels that I never wore. It turned out that he loved me in heels — and also, he had made his peace with his height and his body, and didn't need me to change the way I dressed or the things I liked to make him feel more like a man. Short guys know they are short, and very few of them will demand that you make concessions about it (the ones who do are jerks, obvi).

7. Short guys live longer than tall guys

Short men live two years longer than tall men, on average — good news for any of my fellow morbid straight women who spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if they or their partner will die first.

8. Short guys don't have a Napoleon complex

Being short doesn't make you power-hungry, demanding, or give you something to prove. Jerks come in all shapes and sizes, yo.

9. You don't need to feel 'tiny' in order to feel sexy

I've encountered a lot of women who say that they only want to hook up with taller dudes because they want to feel 'tiny' and like they're being 'ravished' in bed. To which I can only reply: dude, have you ever actually been ravished? It has nothing to do with height, unless your main sexual fetish is being carried back and forth across a room, over and over again. Sexiness, virility, and even old-fashioned machismo are not outside the domain of shorter guys.

Plus, the idea that the only way you can feel like a 'real woman' in bed is to be smaller than your partner smells like anti-feminist propaganda to me, frankly. Why doesn't everyone just try to be whatever size they actually are, and just bang the hell out of each other that way?

10. Only dating guys who are above a certain height is pretty superficial

Listen, what turns you on is what turns you on, and if you can really only get a wide-on for dudes over six feet, that's a-okay. But if you're only into tall guys, I would urge you to think about why you'll only date tall guys. Imagine meeting a guy who said he'd only date girls with D cup boobs or larger. You'd think he was a total pig, right? You'd also think his priorities were all out of whack — having big boobs has nothing to do with being a good partner, or even being a good lover or physically attractive. Do you see where I'm going with this? It's worth looking inside yourself, and seeing if height is what actually turns you on, or just what society has taught you to prize in a partner.

11. Men who are into dating women who are taller than them can be pretty enlightened

Of course, this dating/height bias goes both ways. A lot of men want to date a woman who is physically smaller than them, for the same reasons that a lot of women want to hook up with tall guys: that's how society says it should go, and it physically replicates our social ideas of the roles men and women should play in heterosexual relationships — that men should be big and powerful, and that women should be less powerful.

That's why a guy who's game for dating a taller woman might have more progressive ideas about dating and women in general, too — a 2014 study suggested that men 5'7' and shorter did more housework, were less likely to get divorced, and were more open to dating older women. All facts that ring true to me — my dude pulls his weight around our house, and was game to date me even though I was 28 and he was 24 when we met. Though the paper didn't delve into why this disparity exists, I think we might be able to chalk it up to empathy. Short men have been considered 'less than' by a culture that still equates height with masculinity, and this has opened their eyes to what a crock traditional gender roles can be.

Obviously, not all short guys are male feminists, and not all tall guys are cavemen who think you should go make them a sandwich. But short men have a different cultural experience than tall men, and I believe that this can make them excellent lovers, amazing boyfriends, and sensitive partners.

Or they're just better boyfriends because their faces are already located closer to your vagina. Either way, score!

Want more of Bustle's Sex and Relationships coverage? Check out our new podcast,I Want It That Way, which delves into the difficult and downright dirty parts of a relationship, and find more on our Soundcloud page.

Images: Giphy (12)

How

Ever wondered what dating is like in Japan?
Well, then this post is exactly what you’ve been looking for!

However, if you want to read about bragging stories of all those Western guys who get laid a hundred times per day, then you came to the wrong place.
There are tons of blog posts like that out there. You certainly won’t find that here – and not from a foreign girl like me!

Before we start talking about “Dating in Japan” one thing should be crystal clear:

Dating Experience is Different for Foreign Women and Men

If you’ve ever been to Japan you might have noticed that there’s a tremendous number of (often not so handsome) foreign guys walking hand-in-hand with Japanese women. And at the same time, there’s only a very tiny number of foreign (read: non-Asian) women with Japanese men next to them.

You might ask yourself why is that?
Maybe that’s a secret we’ll never quite get, but there are many theories!

A lot of Japanese women want a guy that tells them several times a day how much he loves them. For some reason (maybe through the consumption of too many Hollywood movies) Japanese women think that foreign men are like that! They’re not afraid of showing their feelings in public or telling their girls flat out how they feel about them.

Of course, having a foreign boyfriend is also “cool” and “exotic“. Some just use those poor guys as cute little “accessories“.
The extreme version of this is known as “gaijin hunter” and some will do everything for the sake of having one of those adorable “half”-kids (half Western, half Japanese) just to toss their foreign guy later on.

For foreign women, it’s a completely different story.
Japanese men seem to expect certain things from a woman. Things that they fear a foreign woman would not agree to do (e.g. stay-home moms, always pour new alcohol into his empty glass etc.).
Maybe they also think that a foreign woman might expect from their man that he’s telling his feelings straight out several times a day, something a shy Japanese man just won’t do.

Another problem is that many of the Japanese men seem to be afraid of their English ability and thus fail to approach a foreign woman.
Most foreign men on the other hand, have no issues approaching a Japanese woman in English – or even in broken Japanese.

These are just a few theories by friends, co-workers and myself. I’m sure you have your own and there’s much more behind all this.

Dating in Japan as a Foreign Man:

As a result, dating in Japan is usually quite easy for men.
At least getting one woman after another into your bed, is really easy, even if you’re quite ugly!
For some reason, Japanese women seem to find even ugly foreign guys attractive …..

It might be a bit more difficult if you’re looking for a serious relationship as there are those women I mentioned earlier who either want you as “exotic accessory” or just want your DNA to create a cute “half-child”.

All in all, it is comparably easy for a Western foreign man to find a Japanese woman or to have a nice relationship here in Japan.
For some guys, it really gets to their heads and they start bragging about it like crazy. They suffer from the so-called superstar syndrome.


Dating in Japan as a Foreign Woman:

For (Western) foreign women in Japan it’s a completely different story.
Japanese guys are often too shy or even scared and the majority of Western men is only interested in Japanese / Asian women.
As a result it is extremely tough to find a date as a foreign woman here in Japan.

Short Guys 5'4' How Is Your Dating Life In Usable

Short guys 5

It is by far not impossible and I know quite a few girls who don’t only have a Japanese boyfriend, but are also married to a Japanese guy, but it is still the BIG exception!

Some of us will go through a hard time here in Japan.
You’ll start to feel completely unattractive and ignored at times.
Of course, you get a lot of attention and there’s all this staring, but it’s not because anybody is flirting with you … or at least you don’t know the difference anymore.

It might be a different story in bigger cities such as Tokyo and Osaka with a more international community, but in smaller cities and in the countryside with more traditional ideals it can be very difficult for foreign women.

Differences in Relationships:

I personally know a few couples where either the man or the woman is foreign and I noticed quite a lot of differences in the kind of relationship they have.

Please note that the following is based on my personal experience and that not everybody out there is like that.

Foreign Man + Japanese Woman:

In relationships where the man is foreign, I noticed that they mostly speak his native language. Although they live in Japan and sometimes even have children together who also speak Japanese, the foreign guys don’t / can’t speak Japanese.

I also experienced that they’re unable to do anything on their own. Just one example is a co-worker of mine. When I asked him how he obtained his cellphone or credit card, he said his wife did everything for him.
Consequently, a lot of foreign men in Japan don’t see the need to study Japanese, because their wives will take care of all the important things.

One big problem seems to be the fact that in Japan the man earns the money, but the woman takes care of it! The man only gets a small allowance. He actually needs to ask his wife for permission if he wants to spend any of his own hard-earned money! Foreign guys often seem to struggle with this system.

Because of all that I’ve seen couples who got divorced, even when there were kids involved. I noticed that those kinds of relationships seem to work out better if they live in his home country and not in Japan.

Short Guys 5'4' How Is Your Dating Life In Usage

Foreign Woman + Japanese Man:

For the opposite constellation, you’ll see that in most(!) cases the woman speaks Japanese. She has studied Japanese properly or puts in a lot of effort to improve her Japanese ability even if the Japanese man can speak her native tongue.

Short Guys 5'4' How Is Your Dating Life In Usa Today

They know how to survive in Japan even without the help of their Japanese partner who is at work most of the time anyway.

The man seems to accept that she wants to keep working even after marriage. Most of the time those kinds of Japanese men who get into a relationship with a foreign woman are more open-minded and have some experience with foreign culture because they’ve lived or studied abroad for a while. And even those who haven’t, seem to accept that there are cultural differences. So, they don’t expect the same they would from a Japanese woman.

All the couples I know of have a relatively harmonic relationship. Of course, there are enough reasons for disputes, but all in all, they seem to manage better than couples where the man is foreign.

Short Guys 5

Conclusion: Dating in Japan

There’s so much more that could be said about this topic. I’d love to discuss it with you, so get involved in the comment section below.
I’m sure everyone has their own opinion and experience with this.

All I want you to keep in mind is that as a guy you should not let it get to your head because suddenly you get all this attention from beautiful women.
And as a foreign girl you should keep in mind that your time in Japan – at least in terms of romantic relationships – could be quite lonely at times.

Read on:

If you still want to read more, here are some great books on “Dating in Japan”:

Short Guys 5'4' How Is Your Dating Life In Usa 2017

  • Understanding Japanese Women by Jonathan C. Richards
  • How to Meet Japanese Women by Evan Carter
  • True Stories of Mixed Dating in Japan by Yuta Aoki(who’s also written a dating article on my blog)

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