When I was younger I didn’t have a type when it came to the men I fell for or agreed to date. Two years ago I met someone who was tall and handsome. He can be described as an alpha male that anybody would want to date. He broke my heart so bad. The problem is now, “tall and well-built” has become my type.
I connected with some guy online. He seemed OK. He’s funny and genuinely interested in me. Then he threw me a question about how tall I was. I figured he isn’t so tall and he wanted to make sure he was taller than me. It put me off and I am reluctant to go further with him or agree on meeting as I don’t want to waste his time or cause him any insecurity if his height is a dealbreaker for me.
I don’t know if the first guy has given me an alpha male complex or that sort of thing? Is there a way to overcome this so that I can see men for who they are, not what their heights are?
Eleanor says: Sexual attraction often reveals truths we’re not prepared to speak out loud. There are self-described “introverts” who are never romantically alone; moral conservatives whose sexual choices are neither; punks who only date women exactly like their mothers and “commitment-phobes” on their fifth wife. Our choices about who to sleep with can make patterns showing up the truth about who we are, whether we like it or not.
One way to read your question is: how can I make my pattern more like the person I want to be?
I have to tell you, I’ve never understood the preoccupation with men’s height in heterosexual dating. To me it feels like ruling someone out because they have hairy knuckles or hairless knuckles or flat fingernails or round ones – a legitimate preference, inasmuch as we all have the right to decline any relationship for any reason, but an utterly baffling one. It seems to freight a heritable physical characteristic with so much more than it deserves; to treat it as a symbol of something else worth wanting, when in fact it couldn’t possibly be. We all know we can’t draw conclusions about something as hefty and deliberate as a person’s character from something as trivial and contingent as how long their legs are.
You asked how you could overcome this.
I’ll give it to you straight: I think perhaps the best strategy you could pursue is to start to see this preference as unkind. There isn’t a man alive who missed the memo that “real men” are supposed to be tall and handsome. Any mirror in a commercial gym or a boys’ school can tell you how many men view their bodies as the image of someone who has failed: failed to be big enough, tall enough, tough enough, or to meet any other standard of manliness. It can be easy to think that body criticism is a women’s issue: in fact, from a very early age boys are taught – well, they’re taught what you wrote: that anybody would want to date “an alpha”.
Are these things you want to tacitly approve of? When your patterns of attraction start to tell a story, do you want it to be the story of someone who endorsed that system of what men “should” be?
If someone were to tell you they couldn’t see themselves with a woman of a certain weight, or age, or skin quality, or hair shininess, I think that would sound like what it is: a two-dimensional ideal of what women (and relationships) should be. An ideal pulled from magazines or TV – anywhere but encounters in real life with real people. You might hope that this person could shepherd their feelings of attraction towards their truer values by reflecting on what they’re unwittingly participating in. Perhaps you can do the same in reverse: try to focus your romantic energy on the values you want to have more of in your life – warmth, wit, kindness, character, integrity – things people don’t get straight from the genetic lottery.
If you want a relationship with a person, you have to relate to them as a person, not as a set of physical characteristics. Perhaps the way to do that is to focus less on the kind of person you want to date, and more on the kind of person you want to be.
This question has been edited for clarity
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