My hypothesis: Most women reject short men as mates and most men reject fat women as mates. A successful marriage tends to strongly correlate to socioeconomic success, longevity, etc.
I hate feeling like some of my comments get downvoted into the negatives merely for providing a female perspective. But, apparently, that bothers me less than the idea of not providing a female perspective at all.
Over time, things have gotten better. I like to think that is partly my doing.:-)
Take care.
Are you sure? Because this, why being `obvious' after 15 seconds of thinking, may be or not be true.
My anecdotal observations reveal an unusual number of pairs where a tall woman happily dates below average height man. It works the other way too, short women often date tall men.
Anyway, no person really need most people of opposite genre accepting them as a mate. A few is usually enough.
If you'll prove that tall men have more successful marriages, it would be a huge deal, so I assume that no such correlation exist.
Successful marriage is a complicated thing and I assume that its relation to ease of dating and partner selectivity is very non-linear.
My ex husband was slightly shorter than me, so it isn't all women. But, yes, bias by women against short men is a well known thing. If they will not even accept a first date because of your height, the odds of marriage go down pretty seriously. You need to get your foot in the door and get to the altar as some minimum prerequisites for achieving a successful marriage.
Furthermore, my recorded stats of women's profiles in the online dating site Match.com show a significantly higher number of women prefer to date men of their own height or taller than women who are willing to date men shorter than them. Plus, it's also not uncommon for short women to exclusively date tall men, whereas it's very rare for even tall women to date guys who are significantly shorter than them.
It's not very relevant who people date, much more relevant who they end up with. Might be counter-intuitive.
Aren't you saying the same thing as Mz? That women will favour men taller than themselves? A tall woman will often be shorter than an above-average-height man.
In my unscientific observation, tall woman / short dude is usually linked to a relatively older woman.