DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was perusing YouTube looking for feel good material as I improve my confidence in myself. I found a lot of videos of women talking about how they’d happily date a short guy if they liked him.
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Of course, comments gonna comment and a vibe I picked up on was that men who are short or “deficient” in whatever way need to make up for it by being exceptional in other ways.
While obviously having good presentation, social skills etc. is essential, I find the whole “compensation” thing really weird.
As a short guy myself I’ve really learned to love my height and what it means for me (due in no small part to your blog).
What do you think on this topic?
King Under The MountainBottom of Form
DEAR THE KILLING KIND OF LOVER: You’re asking the wrong question, KUTM, and it all comes down to one specific word: “compensate”. Words have power, after all, and that one word changes the meaning and intent of the question.
Here’s the issue and here’s why you’re getting this wrong: attraction is about having something that people want. Everyone who is attractive has a quality or qualities that people desire. Without those qualities, there is no attraction. End of story.
But what those qualities are is highly variable, in no small part because hey, humans are sapient and sentient. The folks who get hung up on evo-psych end up reducing people to the level of animals – that we’re somehow at the mercy of our instincts or basest desires. But we aren’t. Part of the gift and curse of our self-awareness is our individuality and how our lives and personalities are shaped and molded by our experiences, upbringing and environment. Much of what we consider to be attractive is cultural, not inherent. For a long time, people in Oceanic and Southeast Asian cultures considered blackened teeth to be desirable because how it demarcated humans from animals; as a result, people would blacken their teeth with lacquer. Colonial powers found it disgusting and used pressure to enforce more Westernized standards of beauty. In Japan, for example, teeth blackening lasted until the Meiji era, which coincided with increased contact with – and increased influence by – European cultures and the desire by the Meiji leaders to westernize Japan.
Similarly, the body types that people consider desirable change like fashion. If you look at classical European art, you may notice that the body types chosen to represent figures like Venus or Helen of Troy or other great beauties tended to be more zaftig, often with larger hips and buttocks, softer and more rounded stomachs but also smaller breasts, than what is currently considered to be conventionally attractive. The supermodel Twiggy almost single-handedly kicked off the waifish look, which reached its height with Kate Moss who looked like a heroin-addicted Victorian urchin.
The desirable bodies for men are just as varied. The Greeks and Romans considered things like large penises to be signs of low intelligence and low culture, the mark of the barbarian and the muscle-bound statues of Herakles or Zeus had proportions that were considered to be marks of divine heritage, not necessarily what humans were expected to achieve. Fifty years ago, hirsute men were considered to be especially hot and sexy, while hairless torsos left people clammy and gave them the ick. Since then, men have adopted more of the styling and body types that were predominant in gay culture and suddenly body hair became distressing. Harrison Ford was thought to be the peak of manliness when he took his shirt off in Raiders of the Lost Ark and famously was working out like crazy to achieve that look. Except now he looks far more like a guy who’s pretty fit compared to Brad Pitt in Fight Club or every male actor in a Marvel movie. Meanwhile, a lot of women squee over the lither figures of many KPop idols or more twink-ish figures like Timothee Chalamet and just as many dig the dad-bod that David Harper sported as Sheriff Hopper.
The wide variability of what is “attractive”, and the non-existence of a universal standard, is why you’re asking the wrong question, with the wrong word. “Compensate”, in your question, implies that there’s inherently something wrong with being average height or shorter than average, and there isn’t. It implies that they are having to make up for some deficiency. But it’s only a deficiency for people who prioritize height, not something wrong with them as individuals.
Attraction is about the holistic person, the sum of their being and qualities – the intellectual, emotional, personality, talents and quirks as well as their physical attributes. Each person is going to have qualities in different proportions all based around their personal development, background, experiences and so on. Similarly, each person is going to have things that they are particularly drawn to, value or prioritize at different levels.
Someone not having one particular quality doesn’t automatically mean that they’re unattractive; it just means that the balance of their sum totality may or may not add up to what a person is into. For folks who may like tall people but don’t make it their top priority, someone who is of average height can still be attractive, simply because they have other qualities that those people also desire.
Nor is this restricted to height. You can, for example, like women with large breasts but still be into someone with smaller ones because there’re other things about them that you also find attractive. Someone else may not have the same cheekbones as a particular movie star, but they have other qualities that people find desirable. In both cases, those people aren’t compensating for the lack of double D’s or cheekbones you could grate cheese on, it’s that the overall balance of who they are makes them attractive.
In labeling this as needing to “compensate”, you’re coming to it from the position that there’s something wrong, as opposed to it being a neutral fact about a person. Treating those qualities as “compensating”, rather than “this is what I bring to the table” only serves to damage your self-esteem and makes it that much harder to come to any relationship with the desire to find someone who’s worth your time. If you feel like you’re “compensating”, then you’re apologizing for your existence… and that’s not attractive at all.
Good luck.
Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com