My first love was a teenage dream in baggy shorts and thick-soled sneakers, a studious, quiet skate kid who was so beautiful that people at the mall or at a punk show would stand there and just look at him, who was so sweet my family made fun of him for dating me. He eventually got a PhD and now lives in B.C. and runs ultra-marathons through avalanches, or something like that. He was, or is, relatively short, or “not tall” to use the softening language of those who have yet to recognize the increasingly obvious majesty of Short Kings.

Like anything you love when you’re 17, a Short King stays in your heart forever. Before I’d heard the phrase, which was courtesy of the writer and comedian Jaboukie Young-White (who tweeted last month “‘short’ gave you donald glover. ‘short’ gave you tom holland. ‘short’ gave you daniel kaluuya. ‘short’ gave you Bruno f***** mars. short kings are the enemy of body negativity, and I’ll be forever proud to defend them” and declared June 21 “Short King Appreciation Day”), I’ve been an advocate of short, or shorter, guys.

I mean, at almost-not-quite-but-almost 5-foot-3, most people seem tall to me. After my first love, I dated guys who were mostly somewhere in that neverland of tallish without being specifically tall — maybe 5-foot-8 to 6-feet — and married someone who describes his height — 5-foot-10 — as “average in an almost institutional way.”

Short guys, though. Is there a better-kept but also totally apparent dating secret than a short guy — assuming, of course, that he’s already cleared the bars of being kind, decent, honourable, datable — who isn’t defensive about his height, and doesn’t lie about it, who — and I hate this phrase, and its corny go-girl vibration, but it works — “owns it”? Online-dating profiles are notorious for hosting exaggerated claims of height, but a Short King would never. Or, maybe he would — women’s expectations must loom, low and rumbling, over a short guy who can maybe get away with claiming an extra few inches — but he shouldn’t need to.

Height, for men, should instead be enthusiastically included in the body-image revolution, but hasn’t really, yet. While women post selfies of their stretch marks and pimples — like most, this galvanizing era was started by women in some advanced pockets of social media, with an assist from celebrities like Lena Dunham and Chrissy Teigen and ads from body-posi brands like Glossier and Aerie, and then finally arrived in a still-resistant pop culture — men, just generally, don’t participate in the same way, even with the prevalence of Short Kings, stars of red carpets and action movies, men with hot wives and tall money.

But really, why would they? What are the immediate rewards when men are still managing conflicting expectations of masculinity, and when so many women still list “tall” as a quality they want in a guy they want to date, often the only physical attribute floating innocently beside “sense of humour,” “honest,” “loves his mom” and “loves his job” or at least “employed”? Women whose objective is a good relationship with a good guy sometimes look right past a man whose only transgression against Big Masculinity isn’t even that he is specifically “short” but that he is “not tall.” It seems more likely that people like what height signifies: masculine capability, protection, safety, comfort, the stuff that is easy to extrapolate when your face lands in a guy’s sternum, when you feel tiny as a teacup in comparison, when being engulfed and enclosed by someone else’s body feels like relief.

But, you know, none of that is real, necessarily: a man who is short — especially a man who is short and is whatever about it — is no less masculine, no less (or more!) capable of offering women what they seem to want from hetero relationships than a guy who has accelerated past some made-up minimum. Women who are single and who have been looking: consider a Short King, next time.