This is hurting more than I thought it would.

[boltnrun]

Even with what you perceive as good breeding potential there are no guarantees.

I went to school with a set of twin girls who were unfortunate looking. Bad skin, just unattractive faces and large (tall and husky, would never, ever be a size 6). Their parents were THAT couple in high school...the two most attractive people in school. No idea why that happened, but genetics are tricky.

Also, my ex husband is tall. He is 6'2", his two older brothers are 6'3" and 6'4". His sister is 5'9". His younger brother? 5'7". Why that happened? Again, genetics are a crap shoot and there are no guarantees that a tall woman will produce tall children.

My ex husband and I are not the prettiest people in the room. We're average. Our kids? Beautiful creatures. And it's not just us thinking so. We'd get stopped in stores, at the post office, at restaurants by strangers admiring our kids. We even had one person say "how did the two of you produce THEM???" They are tall (I am short...5'2" on a good day), our son is 6'4" (wishes he were shorter, go figure) and our daughter is 5'9" (wishes she were shorter, again go figure).

Your children may inherit your lack of height, your bad skin...again, no guarantees.

I think it's a shame you'd pass up a wonderful woman just because she might not produce children whose height you'd find acceptable. But what would you do if you married a 5'10" woman and your son turns out to be 5'8" and you have a daughter who's 6'? I have to believe you'd love them anyway, but would you be disappointed?

Oh well...you gotta do what makes you happy.

[Andrina]

If you have children, even if you don't voice that you're disappointed that your son isn't taller than you by age 16, or that your daughter has spina bifida and will never be able to walk like her parents and brother, or they possess any other flaw you consider genetically unpleasing, they will sense your disappointment and feel like your approval will always be out of reach.

If you're wanting children in order to raise your self esteem and showcase to other people how you've mixed what you consider mediocre genes with top shelf genes and therefore created offspring with a superior appearance, then you're having children for the wrong reasons. (OMG, typing that reminded me of the Aryan Race ideology)

Some of your must-haves are realistic, but this one about the offspring makes me think you could benefit from some therapy because it's not your average thought process, and that mindset would be harmful to any child you bring into this world.

Finding who you find attractive is inherent and nothing you can choose, but you're placing limitations on yourself with your stringent criteria of height and looks which relate back to what your offspring will look like if you pair with a particular lady, which is really unrealistic. For one thing, children don't always end up looking like a parent. Sometimes they look like grandma. Sometimes they look like an ancestor 7 generations back. My father is 5'11. My younger brother is 5'8. My older brother is almost 6'5. You never know what you're going to get, like the proverbial box of chocolates.

By seeking therapy, maybe you'll get to the heart of why you think having a stunning looking child will raise your worth as a human being, and maybe your must-have list will have relaxed in a way that will enable you to have a higher success rate in finding a good match.

[MirrorKnight]

Even with what you perceive as good breeding potential there are no guarantees.

I went to school with a set of twin girls who were unfortunate looking. Bad skin, just unattractive faces and large (tall and husky, would never, ever be a size 6). Their parents were THAT couple in high school...the two most attractive people in school. No idea why that happened, but genetics are tricky.

Also, my ex husband is tall. He is 6'2", his two older brothers are 6'3" and 6'4". His sister is 5'9". His younger brother? 5'7". Why that happened? Again, genetics are a crap shoot and there are no guarantees that a tall woman will produce tall children.

My ex husband and I are not the prettiest people in the room. We're average. Our kids? Beautiful creatures. And it's not just us thinking so. We'd get stopped in stores, at the post office, at restaurants by strangers admiring our kids. We even had one person say "how did the two of you produce THEM???" They are tall (I am short...5'2" on a good day), our son is 6'4" (wishes he were shorter, go figure) and our daughter is 5'9" (wishes she were shorter, again go figure).

Your children may inherit your lack of height, your bad skin...again, no guarantees.

I think it's a shame you'd pass up a wonderful woman just because she might not produce children whose height you'd find acceptable. But what would you do if you married a 5'10" woman and your son turns out to be 5'8" and you have a daughter who's 6'? I have to believe you'd love them anyway, but would you be disappointed?

Oh well...you gotta do what makes you happy.

I get that inheritance is not an exact science... each individual comes with a bundle of genes, some good, some bad. Somebody who looks very attractive and healthy could be a carrier for a dangerous recessive gene that is simply not expressed in that individual, but could still affect his/her children if their partner also happens to possess that gene. I get that each child essentially a genetic lottery randomly combining the genetic information of his/her parents, trying to find a fitter partner just increases the quality of the gene pool from the mother's side, but of course there is no assurance that our children won't be very unlucky and inherit our weaknesses instead of our strengths. (Though in general bad traits are recessive)

If I have children, regardless of how they are born, I will love and support them unconditionally. I have absolutely no doubt of that. If I married somebody tall and our son was unfortunately shorter than me regardless (very unlikely tbh) then I would accept him the same as if he were 6ft+ I just feel like I should "do my part" to give my potential offspring the best chance possible conditions to live a happy life.

[MirrorKnight]

If you have children, even if you don't voice that you're disappointed that your son isn't taller than you by age 16, or that your daughter has spina bifida and will never be able to walk like her parents and brother, or they possess any other flaw you consider genetically unpleasing, they will sense your disappointment and feel like your approval will always be out of reach.

If you're wanting children in order to raise your self esteem and showcase to other people how you've mixed what you consider mediocre genes with top shelf genes and therefore created offspring with a superior appearance, then you're having children for the wrong reasons. (OMG, typing that reminded me of the Aryan Race ideology)

Some of your must-haves are realistic, but this one about the offspring makes me think you could benefit from some therapy because it's not your average thought process, and that mindset would be harmful to any child you bring into this world.

Finding who you find attractive is inherent and nothing you can choose, but you're placing limitations on yourself with your stringent criteria of height and looks which relate back to what your offspring will look like if you pair with a particular lady, which is really unrealistic. For one thing, children don't always end up looking like a parent. Sometimes they look like grandma. Sometimes they look like an ancestor 7 generations back. My father is 5'11. My younger brother is 5'8. My older brother is almost 6'5. You never know what you're going to get, like the proverbial box of chocolates.

By seeking therapy, maybe you'll get to the heart of why you think having a stunning looking child will raise your worth as a human being, and maybe your must-have list will have relaxed in a way that will enable you to have a higher success rate in finding a good match.

I genuinely don't think my preference for genetically healthy children has much to do with my ego. I think it is more to do with the way I see the world... increasingly split between the haves and have-nots, with AI and automation replacing most low-skill blue collar and white collar jobs in the coming decades, the competition for meaningful and fulfilling careers will become ever more intense. I want my children to have the best odds possible of succeeding in such a world, because I fear being mediocre in the 21st century will mean a life of confusion, lack of purpose, lack of hope.

[Wiseman2]

These are the only two non-modifiable features. The rest is up to you and your life style. However given all that, height is really this only one. All the rest are treatable, from skin problems, wearing glasses, getting fit and treatment for depression, etc..

Furthermore it's not as simple as the eugenics you are thinking about. You could marry a 6 foot supermodel-bionic woman and all your kids could still come out with all the traits you have but dislike. Your logic is completely flawed by the fact that it has no or very simplistic scientific validity.

The human genome and all the environmental factors are simply too complex for this. The best approach would be to find someone who is as imperfect and human as you are and learn to love yourself so you can love others. You don't have to stay with Jane or Cathy or any other local women. You can simply breakup without all this rationalizing and pseudoscience.

I am short (172cm) for a guy. short sightness,

[figureitout23]

There is a whole lot going on here...

I wish I had the time to dive in right now because man!

The physical genetics argument alone... you were with a woman who needed to be completely dependent on you for her wellbeing because she hoped from caretaker to caretaker... saw nothing wrong with that... but a not so fortunate looking woman is a no go...

Holy crap there is so much going on here. Much like I was, I think you’d be a therapist wet dream, you speak well, which seems to give people pause when laying it all out, but MAN there’s a lot going on here...

[boltnrun]

I'm trying to figure out how you equate height with "a happy life".

Where did you get the idea that taller people are happier and more successful? Is it because you're self conscious about being short so you presume tall people are happy?

It's just a strange conclusion to arrive at.

[Andrina]

When my father was in high school, he broke up with the prettiest blond cheerleader because he felt she was one-dimensional and he couldn't have in depth conversations with her. He then dated my mother who had a serious acne problem. Because she was a people person, flirty, and had a lot of joy to offer, she never went without dates.

To me, the people who really succeed in attracting people and nailing job interviews are confident, exude joy, are well spoken, and go for what they want, putting in the effort needed. When you look around you at work, you will see every level of attractiveness and heights in your co-workers. There will always only be a minor percentage of jobs being done by robots, so your logic is faulty.

Each person I know is born with a gift or talent, no matter the package. And most people would agree charisma and a great personality trumps attractiveness every time when it comes to who a person would choose to be around or hire. When an attractive jerk enters your space, you run the other way. Best to have the mindset that your child will have good traits and bad traits, just like every person on the planet, and that he or she will be good at doing certain things and not so good at certain things. Your only job is to give that child quality time, being present for listening and enjoying time together, and providing food, shelter, and an education. Don't place your stress on them that they have to look like a flawless gem for anyone to give them the time of day. Like I said before, your anxiety about how the world will treat your child because of his looks will not be hidden from him and that's emotional abuse, so either don't have children or seek therapy until you achieve a more positive and logical mindset.

[bluecastle]

The A.I. comment was interesting to me. When it comes to women, children, even yourself, you can veer into a kind of programmer/engineer approach, with so much of your thinking fueled by "optimization," as they put it in the tech community.

Good for apps, good for capitalism—worlds in which the present is just a glitchy gas station where we fill up en route to a more glittering fantasy of the future. But not quite how human connection works—a world in which the present is all there is.

People all want the same thing, at our core, and it's not height or money. It's what you wanted when you started this thread: to be seen and appreciated as blood and guts. Be it men, women, or children, we want to feel like people. People who hurt, who love, who question, who answer, who float forever between a state of lost and found. It is kind of the ultimate gift we can give another person—the cherishing of another's humanity, be that other a partner or a child created with a partner—and the ultimate gift we can get from life, the feeling that our humanity is seen and cherished.

This was the gift that was elusive in your relationship with Jane. She became, to put it in language you seem to absorb, a "bug" in your operating system—perhaps, in part, because before you met her you were still "programmed" to look in the mirror and see MK1.0 struggling to become MK3.0 as opposed to the beautiful thing you are: MK. You tried to fix the bug in a zillion ways, but the same error code kept flashing on the screen, at which point the tinkering stopped being rewarding and became exhausting. Happens, happened. That's the basic story of most relationships that run their course, and it's likely to be the story of any relationship—including parent with child—where one person sees the other as a variable in an equation rather than a fellow human on the planet.

The crazy thing about having a kid is that you don't, in the end, have one once of "control" about who they become. Influence, yes. Control, no. Need proof? Look in the mirror: You know your parents, what they want/wanted from you. And you can see reflected back where some of that came true, and some of it did not, because your own truths (biological, intellectual) didn't line up with theirs. No control, see? Same goes for a partner, just as it goes for friendships. Zero control. Zilch.

It requires a tremendous amount of confidence to understand and embrace this, and we build that confidence by controlling the only variable we can: ourselves. That we can optimize. You want to be more fit, for instance? Easy. While the coffee brews do a plank for 10 seconds followed by 10 pushups. In time those numbers will change to 30 and 30, just like the numbers in a saving account will increase if you spent only 60 percent of what you earn. Pop out a kid and, who knows? The kid is maybe influenced to do those pushups and save money—or, well, not. Or the kid rejects those pushups and frugality while you are alive, and gets really serious about them after you die. So it goes. All outcomes are wins. That's the gorgeous part.

All that self-optimization is forever; it stops when your heart and brain stop, and will go sideways a million times over from now till then. Understanding and accepting that is just another form optimization—optimizing yourself to be able to exist fully in the present while having a human brain capable of thinking about both past and future. That, in a nutshell, is cherishing your own humanity—and it's the bedrock to being able to cherish another's.

I too think you'd have a blast in therapy. It's like a self-optimization simulator so you can be your actual self in reality, rather than think of fellow humans (partner, child with partner) as vessels for self-optimization. That's the "cheat code" approach to the game, you see? One way to "beat it," sure, but never as satisfying as the intended way.

[maew]

I find it interesting that you're trying to find a woman who will "improve" your gene pool, so to speak.

Alright... so while I don't necessarily think you are looking for a breeding mare, I wholeheartedly agree with the above and here's why.

You mention a number of times about how mediocre you are, your negative physical traits, how you need to be around positive people that lift you up, and how you want a woman that will help correct these imbalances in your life.

Thing is, you don't need anyone else to correct these imbalances. You have a lot to offer any woman, I am sure you know this... however if you approach relationships from a point of view of what they can give you vs what you can give them, you doom yourself to be dissatisfied and to never find someone that truly lights your fire.

No human can meet all of our needs, nor should they.. it's entirely up to us to ensure that we come into a relationship offering all of the things we are seeking from others. If you want to meet a woman that lifts you up and is positive, you need to learn to do that for yourself first and foremost. If you want to date women in the top 10%... learn to be a 10% in your own way. Make the most of who you are, and what you have, instead of settling or looking for others to boost you.

If you do your part and focus on being that person you want to attract, those people will naturally gravitate towards you.