Just a few weeks ago, an interesting and
lengthy paper by a pair of sociologists from
New York University made a lot of noise in
what I suppose would these days be called
the community of short men - a community
to which, as it happens, I rather inarguably,
one might say entirely, belong.
Its subject was what is called assortative
mating - the way people divide themselves
up, two by two in that ark-like fashion, for
life. It was one of those wonderfully solemn
sociological papers in which the utterly self-
evident is systematically recast as the
cautiously empirical.
The authors point out early on in their
report that "social psychological research
suggests that attractive people are favoured
in numerous situations" (a thing you would
not have guessed without social science)
and soon after we learn that attractive and
physically fit men report going on more
dates and having sex more frequently than
others.
But the conclusion of the paper, once one
has weeded through, is striking and well
documented. It is simply that short men
make stable marriages. They do this in
circumstances of difficulty and against the
odds and consistently over ages and income
groups, and they do it with the shorter
women they often marry, but also with the
taller women they sometimes land. Short
men marry late but, once they do get
married, tend to stay married longer and, by
social science measures, at least - I assume
this means they ask the short men's wives (I
hope so anyway) - they stay happily married,
too.
Many assertions about the assortative can
be put forward to explain why this is so, but
trust me, it is not hard to figure it out. There
is a simple reason short men make stable
marriages. It is because short men are
desperate. Short men live in a world of taller
men and know that any advantage seized is
better kept. Desperation makes short men
good husbands. We know the odds
instinctively, and knowing that we have
lucked out, intend to continue playing a
good thing.
It is not, I should rush to add, that short
men are desperate to please. One of the
most interesting findings of the study is that
short men actually do less housework in a
typical marriage than tall men do - though
the study points out delicately, this may be
because with tall men, "the nature of their
housework is different".
In other words, they are too short to reach
the tops of closets where the heavy house
cleaning equipment is kept. No, short men
do not make stable marriages because they
are desperate to please. It is because they
are desperate to prevail.
