Height and Education Requirements in Online Dating

Published on April 2, 2012

A reader recently contacted me with the following questions:

I had a couple questions I was hoping you could help me with. I am self-employed, make a comfortable living, and I am about 5’8-5’9 in height. I have run into a lot of profiles where the woman has stated that her date needs to have a bachelor’s degree or be taller than I am. Do you think it is still worth it for me to contact them or should I just focus on my time on other women? Also if I did contact one of them should I mention this (maybe make a joke about it?) or just send a normal first email?

My answer to this email was this: I don’t think you should worry about the bachelor’s degree but I do think you should pay attention to the height. I’ll explain why below.

Interpreting Education Requirements in Dating Profile

So should guys not contact a woman if they don’t meet her education requirements? I think so…under the right circumstances.

With the bachelor’s degree, what I believe most women are saying is that she doesn’t want some slacker who lives in his mom’s basement and plays video games all day long. A bachelor’s degree is a way (sometimes a bad way) to measure a person’s commitment and drive. Many businesses do the same exact thing – they don’t know who you are so the first way they measure you is if you have a piece of paper or not.

However, in most cases, it’s not the piece of paper that’s important. Rather, it’s finding someone she could see being a provider (or in today’s world where both people often work, part of the team that helps provide). If you’re an extremely successful guy who has a two-year degree, I think most woman would find the success attractive regardless of which piece of paper you have.

The one exception I can think to my suggestion is if a woman makes it clear that she’s looking for an intellectual to have deep philosophical discussions with. Not to say that education totally defines intelligence, but I could see instances where a woman would want to date a man who had many years of education for reasons other than personal drive or financial success.

Height Requirements Should Generally Be Observed

In my mind, height tends to be a bit different than education because what the woman is stating as a desire actually is the desire. I do think there are times where you can push it (let’s say she’s looking for 5’10” and you’re 5’9″…well, you might slide by, especially if she’s 5’6″). I wrote an article similar to this topic in some ways that you can find here: Older Med Contacting Younger Women.

As I discuss in that article, I do think there are times you can make an attempt regardless of her requirement but as guys we shouldn’t see it as our right to annoy women by ignoring their requirements altogether.

To sum up my thoughts on height: I would generally not contact women where I am shorter than their height requirement but occasionally would make exceptions if I thought there could be a strong connection.

Joking About Not Meeting Dating Requirements

I recommend against pointing out areas where you don’t perfectly meeting requirement. A lot of people do this and I’ve never seen an email where this came off as attractive (normally it just appeared to add some insecurity to the first email).

I would say this is especially true of the bachelor’s degree because, again, I don’t think it’s really the degree that most women are looking for. Height…well, if you’re 5’8″ but you are contacting a woman who only wants guys over 6’2″ because you think she’s perfect and can’t resist emailing her, I guess in that case you could joke about it because at least then she’d know that you read her profile (and it’s such a long shot already). In this case though, should you really be contacting her?

If it were me, I’d avoid bringing up any areas that are lacking and allow her to make her own choice.

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