Does height really matter when you’re searching for THE ONE on a dating app?

Tinder has again put this touchy question front and centre when it quietly rolled out in May a new filter that allows its premium users to use height as a metric for a potential partner.

A post on Reddit early in June drew the internet’s attention to it, and it has since set off a spirited debate on the state of love and romance in the world and how dating apps may be screwing it all up.

The new filter lets Tinder subscribers who pay for the two highest subscription tiers set the minimum and maximum height of a potential match.

Tinder is, for now, testing this out in “limited” parts of the world, and it is not a hard filter – meaning the setting is more of a suggestion to the algorithm rather than a tool to completely block users of a certain height.

But it has understandably disheartened “short kings” and “tall queens” – and divided everyone in the middle.

Many insist that height is a superficial metric of attractiveness. But there are those who say that it is not easy to overcome social expectations, and so height becomes for them a minimum requirement for anyone wanting to get one foot in the door.

Shorter men, in particular, feel especially targeted by the filter.

“It’s over for short men. What are they going to do now?” one person wrote on X.

“Tinder just declared war on short kings,” wrote another social media user.

Another joked that “pretty girls don’t pay for dating apps. Short kings are safe”.

Others are putting a positive spin on it.

“Why is this a problem?” a Reddit user asked. “If someone likes a certain height, go for it. It also weeds out the (people) who don’t like your height.”

Heightism is real

But “heightism” is real, and it is something that dating apps and social media in general are magnifying with their filters and glorified aspirations for “man in finance, trust fund, 6-foot-5, blue eyes”.

A study in 2022 in the journal Frontiers In Psychology found that women seek men who are 21cm taller than them. Men, on the other hand, are most satisfied when they are 8cm taller than their partners.

Dating apps are exacerbating this fixation on height, Arizona State University Professor Liesel Sharabi, who studies how online dating affects modern love, told CNN.

“They’re seeing people as...