Dating is frustrating for just about everyone, but chances are if you are a) straight man who is b) single and c) not especially tall, you’re getting the short end of the stick.

According to social psychologists Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, height is one of the most important characteristics defining male physical attractiveness to women.

Unfortunately, I’ve found this to be empirically true. One of my biggest pet peeves as a matchmaker is when women tell me that they would never date anyone shorter than six feet tall, thus pre-emptively the vast majority of men, sight unseen.

When I ask these women why they would discount all but a mere 10 to 15 per cent of the human male population, they usually answer they’re “not attracted to guys shorter than six feet.” I follow up by asking them if they’d reject George Clooney (five-foot-10). Or Kiefer Sutherland (five-foot-eight)? How about turning down a date with Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow on Game of Thrones (five-foot-six).

When pressed further, these women (of all heights, incidentally) reveal they “like to wear heels” or want to “feel like a girl,” as if certain heights were more inherently masculine or feminine than others.

Jason Kunin, 47, is a high school teacher and writer. He’s brilliant, funny and five feet tall. Kunin is happily dating a wonderful woman (at five-foot-four and a half, the tallest person he’s ever dated) who he met on an online dating site.

“Online dating allows you the opportunity to provide a more complete sense of who you are in a way that you might not be able to if you were meeting, say, in a noisy bar or across a crowded restaurant,” Kunin says. “You can showcase your wit, your charm, your quirky interests, your literary flair, or whatever it is you have to offer besides your looks and how much physical space you occupy.”

Online dating sites can be both a blessing and a curse however. Some of them allow users to filter prospective matches by height, meaning that if you’re a guy who is five foot five, there are fewer women looking at your profile than that of a guy of otherwise equal charm who is six foot one.

Carissa Imgrund, 37, was one of these women who preferred dating taller men, being a tall person herself (five-foot-10).

“There were many times I wouldn’t even read their profile if I saw their height was less than five-foot-10. It was an automatic delete,” Imgrund says. “And I would go out with guys who I knew were wrong for me, only because they were tall. I found I was more forgiving of a bad photo and personality than I was of their height.”

When Imgrund met a smart and funny man on dating app Bumble, however, the banter was so electric that his (unlisted) height didn’t even cross her mind.

“When we met (in person) and I realized the height difference, I was really nervous at first, but everything else just clicked so well. I was laughing and connecting like I hadn’t ever before within a few hours. It didn’t hurt that he was actually really attracted to the fact that I was taller. By the end of our third date, I couldn’t have cared less he was shorter.”

Three months later, the couple are going strong.

What’s Imgrund’s advice to single women (and men) with an arbitrary height cut-off?

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“Be willing to try — you might be cutting yourself off from someone amazing without even giving them a chance. In the end, what matters is that your weird matches his weird and it won’t matter what the package is when that happens. I thank my lucky stars my guy didn’t put his height in the profile because I probably wouldn’t have said yes to him and now I can’t imagine not having him in my life.”