How a potentially great romance will most likely never get liftoff.

I have much longer, deeper, thoughtful posts in the works on all the following topics I am going to write about, and… sometimes you just get inspired, and right now I’m inspired. The other, individual posts will come out later. This is a little bit of a public rant.

The setting

I’ve dropped off the heightism cause for a little bit. I guess it takes the occasional trigger to reawaken the giant within.

Recently that trigger was romantic. It’s usually romantic. After all, as biological organisms, we only have one program, and that one program is to make more biological organisms. That is our one job. Our Prime Directive. Even if we agree to the conversation that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, we are no less having that physical experience. Therefore, rejection of the sexual nature is rejection at the core of our purpose.

I’ve been kinda sorta “talking” to someone recently who I actually quite like. And she likes me too. Unfortunately for both of us, she has a hangup about being one inch taller than me (she’s 5’7” and I’m 5’6”). I get it. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last that height is an issue. It’s always an issue. This time it hurts a good bit more because we’ve been spending time together and feelings began to cultivate. It’s one thing to be outright rejected before any feelings can develop. It’s another to have someone tell you to your face that they really like you and that you would otherwise be the man for them if it weren’t for this one thing of paramount importance.

I vented to a couple of people close to me and got the usual words of support: “Screw her, she’s stupid, her loss, you’re amazing, there are women that don’t care, etc.” No, it’s not her loss. It’s both our loss. And it’s the loss of every woman who has a hangup and every shorter man who is getting rejected because of that hangup.

Mindset isn’t enough

Andrew Tate has had a lot of media coverage as of late because of his influence on young men and for being imprisoned without charge in Romania (the day before I first drafted this, he was finally released from house arrest. Tate is a subject for a separate topic, and… I believe his release was justified and overdue). Tate brags about his unbreakable mindset while in prison and under house arrest. More notable and historically significant figures, such as Nelson Mandela and MLK (and many others), were also arrested, spent time in jail, and had unbreakable mindsets. I would like to think I have an incredibly strong mindset in most situations. I’ve been told as much by others. Unbreakable? I’m not sure it’s fully been tested to make that claim. The one obvious exception is that all-powerful force that we could claim as “God”. There is no mindset powerful enough if “that force”/God feels like breaking it.

For all battles that we fight, there is an internal subjective and external objective component. The unbreakable mindset is the internal subjective component. The external objective cannot be changed with mindset alone. For example, no unbreakable mindset changed the fact that Andrew Tate, Nelson Mandela, and MLK were in prison (and for Mandela and MLK, we can add black rights/injustices to the external objective reality). Heightism is an external objective reality. Discrimination is real and it is systemic. And it is nurtured from childhood. It’s so bad that there is “agreement”, a broad social “conversation”, that any time a shorter man faces overt discrimination and/or rejection and speaks up about it, it is in his head and up to him to overcome. Certainly, all humans are messed up from the programming we got when we were young. There is work every person can do to become aware of their programming and become better by having breakthroughs and transformations in their life. I do that and I admire all people who walk that path. However, while I can do the inner work (that is where my strength of mind comes from), there is nothing that “I” can overcome to influence a woman that has an issue with a man being shorter than her. That will only ever change if she walks the path to change it.

This is why I continually say that I am out to change the conversation, change the agreement around height discrimination towards shorter men. Only when the conversation changes will the external objective component of this issue change.

Sexual polarity

“I want to feel small in a man’s arms”, she said. What she wants is to feel feminine in the presence of a masculine man. Being small in the larger man’s arms occurs as the easy way to accomplish that.

All humans express both masculine and feminine energy. This was identified and defined thousands of years ago with the Yin & Yang symbol. It was relabeled a couple of hundred years ago by a feminist as “sexual polarity”. The size and “sex-at-birth” of the human being have nothing to do with expressed temperament. I’ve met petite women who were very “butch” and who were soldiers and auto mechanics, and I’ve met giant, flamboyant, effeminate men.

Most couples pair up where sexual polarity is balanced. Whether that’s a classic masculine man and feminine woman or a more effeminate man and masculine woman, and everything in between. Even in same-sex couples, we typically observe that one takes on the more masculine role while the other takes on the more feminine role. We seem to seek that yin-yang balance with another individual.

For many women, they see physical size and the height differential as obvious determining factors of sexual polarity. While that can sometimes be true, it’s not always true, and not a given (as pointed out in the last paragraph). This can be a great if not impossible challenge to overcome as many if not most women reject shorter men outright before even exploring the yin-yang sexual polarity between them and the man.

Fortunately for me and the woman who inspired this post, she is self-aware enough to at least have the conversation with me and explore ways that we can achieve the desired sexual polarity between us. Unfortunately, it is still a major obstacle to overcome in her mind, and sadly, too much of one, as things stopped moving forward (for now at least).

Subjective experience

It is often said that “perception is reality”, and I stand by that. It might not be factually correct, but the experience in the perceiver is nonetheless real. One of the woman’s issues with height is feeling big and feeling like a “mama”, rather than the petite, sexy girlfriend. Another issue is the look of me and her as a couple when in social circles. That is her ego at work, and she has some story about what it means about her (how good or bad she looks) to have a shorter man next to her. These are subjective experiences happening inside her. The challenge is that they have a very real effect on her feeling feminine, and therefore being in her feminine. And, there is little I can do about it.

It’s different from an external expression of sexual polarity, which she and I have experienced (separate from romantic advances). For example, she is reactively inclined to be the planner when we meet. Planning is “doing” energy, which is masculine. I didn’t care at first until we realized that it was a problem for attraction. At this point, I told her that if she wants to stay in her feminine, leave the planning to me. After that conversation, I asked her to take a drive with me, and immediately after asking, she started to plan the route we were going to take. Because this was external, I had the opportunity to tell her to leave the trip planning to me, as we talked about, which allowed her to flow back into her feminine and me into my masculine.

However, there are no quick and obvious “actions” I can take (short of rescuing her from danger) to alter her internal, subjective experience of femininity by way of my size, and change the conversation happening in her head. Only over time can she experience me so fully that height becomes less significant or completely insignificant in comparison to all the other ways she would experience my masculinity.

“I’ve tried it”

One thing I’ve been told by several women (including her) who were taller than me (typically while dismissing romantic potential with me) is “I’ve tried it”, meaning they’ve tried to date a man shorter than them, and it didn’t work out. There are two offenses being committed here. Both point to the same thing. One offense is that it fetishizes height, and the other offense is that it singles height out as the only and obvious reason things didn’t work with the shorter man, while completely ignoring that all the other taller men didn’t work out. We can’t really talk about the two things separately, as they are really of the same mindset. When shorter men are marginalized, we become fetishized as a “thing to try”, and then it becomes an easy excuse with many applications. It becomes an excuse to arbitrarily exclude and reject future shorter, hopeful men. It becomes an excuse to not see the real reason(s) things didn’t work out with the short man. It becomes an excuse to ignore why things never worked out with all the other taller men. And ultimately, it becomes an excuse for the woman to not take responsibility for her actions and grow as a person.

So what do we do? Where do we go?

These experiences break my heart. Like I said, it’s not her loss, it’s our loss. There are several things that can be done. For women who have already been programmed, it is much harder. As I said before, all people can benefit from traveling the path of self-awareness and personal development. On that path, lots of breakthroughs and transformations can occur, and concern for a man’s height is one of those things. More generally, the path of personal development typically illuminates what actually matters and helps to diminish—or eliminate entirely—the desire for superficial things that don’t matter.

We must change the conversation around men’s height. We must change the agreement that shorter men are somehow “less” (less masculine, less capable, less human). We must eliminate the comparison to deformity (yes, the comparison does happen). The prescription of what we must do is not short, and I’ll take the pun! I am working on a much longer blog that will focus on these issues. The quick answer for now, is that we need shorter men in positions of influence. Heightism is truly systemic. Men who are far above average in height are worshipped, while shorter men are effectively ignored. This is evidenced everywhere we look. Only once shorter men are treated as no different (similar to the “All bodies are beautiful” movement for women), and placed in positions of visible status (like modeling, leadership, or a leading actor with a taller sex interest, for example), will we start to send the signal—and dare I say “program” the mind—that a taller woman paired with a shorter man is completely normal, not some fetish to try once in her lifetime.

In closing

I briefly touched on just a few things here. As I said, it was more of a public rant. Truth be told, I was going to post something in a Facebook dating group, but it got long enough that it didn’t make sense to do that.

There is a lot of potential between men and women. It’s a shame to see so much possibility arbitrarily destroyed because of hangups like height.