Should You Lie About Your Height on a Dating App?

No. A padded height gets you into a few more searches and then costs you the first ten seconds of every date, which is the part of the evening you can least afford to lose. The advice you will read on Reddit and other forums usually says that everyone does it, so honesty is a handicap. That sounds practical until you picture her standing in front of you.

The reason is almost always a search filter. Some women set a minimum height, and a man just below that line imagines that adding an inch puts him back in her results.

It does, technically. He appears in a list he would otherwise have missed. What he does not see is everything that happens next. She opens the page, reads a number she cannot check, and decides how much to trust it before she has read a word of his writing.

It buys an appearance in a search, not a date. Those are separate things, and the gap between them is where the lie costs you.

A woman who set a hard minimum and is shown a man at that line is not committed to anything. She still has to like the photos, like the writing, and agree to meet. If she gets as far as the date, she meets a man who is an inch or two shorter than his number, and she learns something about him she did not expect to learn.

That something is not his height. It is that he will say a thing she can check and that is not true. Of all the facts a first date can reveal, that is a poor one to hand over in the first minute.

A woman with a strict minimum is telling you what she wants. Getting past her filter by lying does not change what she wants. It only delays the moment she finds out.

a dating coach is five foot seven, which he says is a little below average. One woman opened a conversation by telling him his height was a dealbreaker, and he carried on talking to her anyway. They went home together. He did not get there by changing the number. He got there by being the man in front of her and not apologizing for it.

So you do not need the women who would rule you out on the number. You need the many who would not, and the honest figure gives you the ones who will actually turn up.

Some men are not lying. They typed the height from a school physical a decade ago, or they measured in shoes, or they gave the number they have always said without checking it.

Measure yourself. Stand barefoot with your back against a wall, put a flat book on your head, mark the wall and measure. Type that. If the figure is a half inch off in either direction, nobody will ever notice, and you can stop thinking about it.

The line between rounding and lying is simple. If a tape measure would back you up, it is rounding. If it would not, it is a lie, and she will find out which one it was when you stand up from the table.

Fix it. Edit the field to the true height, and do it before the next conversation, not after.

If you are already talking to someone and she asks, say the real number plainly and keep the sentence short. Something like "I am five ten, I rounded up on the app and I should have just put the right number" costs you a moment of awkwardness and buys you a lot of respect. Then ask her something and move on. Do not explain it for two minutes, do not make a joke at your own expense, and do not insist that it is basically the same.

If she goes quiet after that, she was either never going to meet you or was going to find out later at a worse moment.

Put your effort into the parts of the page that decide whether she answers you. One clear photograph of your face, one standing full-length photograph so the height question answers itself, and a line of writing that gives her something specific to react to.

After that, reply quickly, suggest a place and a day, and show up. Women judge a man on the whole experience of him, and height is a small number inside a large picture. The man who types it honestly and then behaves like someone with nothing to hide has already done most of the work.