> It's sad - for my age group, I'm roughly average (slightly below) height at 5' 8".

This is not the average for men in certain socioeconomic classes/age groups/ethnicities. For a non malnutritioned young man, 5ft8in or 172cm is probably going to be on the lower end depending on ethnicity.

This is not to make any judgment on which heights woman should or should not be “filtering”.

That's absolutely correct - but 5' 8" is nearly average in my age group (50ish male).

Sorry, I completely glossed over you writing “my age group” in your original comment.

This is fascinating to me. I'm a 5'9 American guy who got married in my early 20s to a girl who I met in college the old-fashioned way (in-person through an extracurricular activity) before the iPhone existed. So I was just never aware at all that height is such a big deal for women until I started reading about it in discussions of these online dating services. I'm wondering:

1. Knowing this, don't guys just lie about their height in their profile?

2. Are most women really able to look at a guy in-person and know that he's 5'10 vs. 6'0? Or is it mostly abstract and only becomes an issue because height is explicitly listed in online profiles?

There is a huge difference between being 5-9 and 5-4. Again, I’m just stating the obvious, I’m happily married and have been for 13 years.

I also started dating my now wife at 35 and she was a single mother of a then 9 and 14 year holding her own and we met at work. She was looking for something different than women in their 20s.

Yes, I can imagine that. At 5'4 I think you're close to the average for women and that will stand out. What's fascinating to me is this apparently strong preference for 6'0+ and not a hair under that.

This is mostly a rhetorical question. But why does the man have to be taller?

My only two long term relationships (and marriages) were with short women. I have never gone after taller women and I only had any type of romantic chemistry with one person that was taller than I was. We were in the same friend group at the gym I taught at and she was going through a divorce. By the time things finalized and the opportunity made itself available, I was dating my now wife.

But was that romantic or rebound?

There is in fact an entire small meme culture of "five feet eleven and a half inches vs six feet" based on the absurdity of this, yes. you can probably get away with being 5'10 or especially 5'11 and lie to say 6' without issue unless you are in fact dating a taller than average woman. But if you get to the point of meetting up that probably won't matter.

You can only lie to some extent, though. hard to pass off 5'8 as 6'.