Like most people these days, I do waste a high percentage of my time just browsing Youtube for interesting videos. One Youtube profiler who caught my eye recently is this Canadian female who most people would consider attractive, based on Western/American/European standards. long blue hair, light blue eyes, relatively non-obese, sweet tempered, with a good sense of humor. She doesn’t seem like the most intelligent person in the world you would meet, with the ability to solve complex partial differential equations, but that is besides the point for this post.

Her boyfriend, from the country of Switzerland, seemed like a relatively nice person as well. The most defining trait about him was that he is abnormally tall, which I guess to be 6′ 8″ with a slightly above average face but a good demeanor.

While it may be enough for some heterosexual male to just be looking at an attractive female (the reward-dopamine neuro-pathway in the brain is triggered over and over again), me being a researcher started to go back to this old hypothesis on the idea that there is a correlation between the attractiveness of a females and the height of her chosen male romantic partner.

I would come across the study “Height predicts jealousy differently for men and women” which showed that based on the height of males, there was an inverse relationship between height and level of jealousy. For females, the results showed that for females of average height, they felt more jealousy when meeting someone who possesses qualities which they didn’t have.

One study that they did reference was “Feingold, A. (1982). Do taller men have prettier girlfriends? Psychological Reports, 50, 810.” The abstract showed that when looking at only a 72 male subject group, male groups that were around 2.6 inch shorter had less attractive female romantic partners, on average, based on linear regression analysis.

Main Take-Away

1. The correlation I proposed about the height of a guy and his girlfriend’s attractiveness has been verified by research which was done more than 30 years ago. 

A huge percentage of life comes down to winning the genetic lottery. The person will go through life thinking that they were the one who used effort to create the success in their life, but success was already 60% pre-determined for them, because they were born in the right time, at the right place, with the right set of genes (tall, attractiveness), in the right conditions (good stable parents in marriage). The famous Investor Warren Buffett is well known for saying that he got lucky in the genetic lottery for being born in Nebraska, ‘white’, and with his type of brain which was designed for asset allocation.

Some people are just born into luckiness. Since they are born with the right genes, with the phenotypical traits that they had, they are almost assured an evolutionarily fit partner. It may not be fair that taller men have better looking girlfriends on average, but that is the way things are in the world.