Height Difference in Couples: What Research Shows

A question people ask often

Many people wonder whether a couple’s height difference is typical. Surveys have long asked what heights people say they prefer in a partner. A better question is what real couples look like, and one study answers that with actual measurements.

The study

Gert Stulp, Abraham Buunk, Thomas Pollet and colleagues published Are Human Mating Preferences with Respect to Height Reflected in Actual Pairings? in PLoS ONE in 2013. They used the UK Millennium Cohort Study, which gathered information from the parents of 18,819 babies born in the United Kingdom in 2000. The analysis included 12,502 heterosexual couples with both heights available.

The authors compared the real couples with thousands of random reshufflings of the same people, which shows what pairing would look like if height played no role.

What they found

Three patterns appeared, and the authors describe the effects as modest.

• Taller people tended to have taller partners, a correlation of r = .18. That is a weak-to-moderate link, not a rule.
• The man was taller than the woman in most couples, more often than chance would predict. In about 7.5 percent of couples, the man was not taller.
• Couples in which the man was more than 25 cm (about 10 inches) taller than the woman were less common than chance would predict.

How to read this

The paper concludes that stated preferences for partner height carry over into real pairings, but only modestly. In other words, many couples do not match the typical pattern, and nothing in the data suggests that a particular height gap makes a relationship better or worse.

The study covers one country and heterosexual couples with children, so it does not describe everyone. Treat it as a description of one group, not a standard for anyone else.

If you are curious how you and a partner look side by side, enter both heights in the comparison tool. It draws simple figures to scale from the numbers you type, which can be a fun way to picture a gap that is hard to judge from memory. The result is only a picture of two numbers.