[ 2014-10-06 ]

Why short men make better husbands
Short men make better husbands, and make up in
wisdom what they lack in stature, says
self-confessed small man, Adam Gopnik.

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, we 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.

An instinctive sense of the odds, born in
schoolyards and playgrounds, tells the short man
to redouble his efforts in every area of life -
the office, the motorway, (God forbid) the golf
course.

This is of course called the Napoleonic complex,
but in truth it is not so much that short men
become Napoleonic as that Napoleon was typically
short - in his ambition, his drive, his uxorious
devotion to his wife Josephine, whom he left only
because he wanted to leave the French with a male
heir. Hers was the last name on his lips, in the
last sentences that he uttered, dreaming of that
old stability.

Source - BBC

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