For those that don’t know me in real life, you probably don’t know that I’m a little bit short. Not an adorable 5ft 5 without heels, or 5ft 3 with a high pony, I’m only tall next to people who have yet to reach double digits.
Being short isn’t exactly a revelation to me since I haven’t grown vertically since I was 12, but as every short person would know, the short jokes get better every time.
Generally speaking, out of all the misfortune in this world, I would take being short over being obnoxious, ignorant or stupid. Like when people tell a short person that they’re “in proportion” in order to soften the blow. As if the person they’re talking to hasn’t realised short they are.
Aside from the short jokes, frequent references to being short and the occasional struggle with people who are 5ft 7 gloating about how tall they are in comparison, life down under hasn’t been so bad. You just pretend that you’ve never been told that it’s okay to be short because it doesn’t matter when you’re horizontal, or that you could give a guy a blow job standing up with the weird, sick dwarf fantasy that person clearly has. You just remember that the bigger they are, the harder they fall, into hell.
Now that we’ve clarified how short I am, let’s get on to the very real date I went on.
Date #26 was …. a bit odd. He commented about my sloth picture (as most matches did) and asked about my time overseas. He then said something about getting back from the Manawatu and the flooding that had happened there over the weekend. As I was driving back from Tauranga, I said “Wow, likewise!” as I clearly had a lot to say about flooding in the Manawatu.
This led to a series of relatively bizarre Tinder comments that even a Tinder veteran like myself found strange.
I found it weird that someone would say, after a day of us matching, that he didn’t realise I was in a relationship, and then admit that he had facebook stalked me.
Usually stuff like this would have resulted in an unmatch, but I only had a few dates left (I had already put in a tiny bit of ground work by responding with more than three words) so I didn’t want to abort mission. Date #26 then suggested, within hours of admitting he had facebook stalked me, that we should exchange slightly risqué pictures on snapchat after I posted a fairly innocent picture of me in a bubble bath with another girl as my ‘story’.
So after asking if my ex boyfriend and I were still together, admitting that he facebook stalked me, and then asking if I approved of sharing slightly risqué pics all within a 48 hour period, I agreed to meet him for a drink. More specifically a coffee during the day, because after his tomfoolery there was no way I was meeting him outside of work hours, or in a dimly lit environment.
We agreed to meet at Nikau, at 12pm the following day. I pushed it out from 11am to 12pm because I am a spiteful bitch had some things to do that morning.
At 12.05pm, I stumbled slightly late into Nikau, horrified at the prospect of being the first one there. Date #26 was already sitting down. I could tell he was tall, but this wasn’t exactly at the front of my mind. He was friendly and perfectly polite, I’ll give him that. It was like he immediately set out to find common ground and from the get go, started talking about travelling as though it was his classic go-to date topic. He said, word for word…
“I consider myself a bit of a travel buff”.
I had to suppress my laughter into my coffee, because it was one of those phrases that sounds perfectly reasonable when it’s written, but strange when someone says it out loud. It’s like saying “Yours sincerely” or Kind regards” out loud instead of saying goodbye. I found it on brand with the entire situation I was in as I continued to listen to him talk about how buff he was at travelling.
Admittedly, I was already pissed off with him after suggesting we exchange slightly risqué photos before we had even met and just wanted to meet him to make sure he wasn’t as weird as I thought he was. In hindsight, as I write this, I don’t think I would have met him, but a part of me wanted to make sure he wasn’t actually a creep in real life (which I can confirm – he was just a travel buff with weird tinder chat).
After 20 minutes of D-Grade chat from my end – coffee couldn’t heighten my spirits, I made some excuse about having a busy day (which was genuinely true) and said that I had to go back to work.
That’s when he stood up.
I’m not often caught off-guard by people’s height when there are people in this world who are 5ft4 and tower over me (they gloat about it too), but the travel buff got me hella shook. I remember my jaw actually dropping, being suddenly overwhelmed and feeling slightly sick with vertigo. This guy was so tall, he didn’t just tower over me, he was a skyscraper and I was an igloo.
I obviously didn’t read the part in his bio that mentioned he was 2 metres tall. Or read it at all.
I think Date #26 got the jist that I was possibly overwhlemed by how much he physically escalated, and offered to pay for coffee as I crawled back to work. Maybe he was just being a perfect gentleman while I was crawling into a hole, aware of how weird this would have looked to onlookers.
I got back to work and told my co-worker about my brief encounter with the tallest person I had ever seen in my entire life. To which she said – “Oh you mean *insert Date#26’s real name*? Yeah, he was an extra on *one of the blockbuster’s filmed in Wellington* because of how how tall he is”.
A day after our date, I got a message from Date #26 reminding me how short I am. Because I was unaware and had forgotten how tall I was.
I did think he was huge, but I never told him that (or anything else ever again). I didn’t want him to think that his height scared me off. The travel buff comment still has me shook to this day though.
I have enough struggles in my life, like my legs never touching the ground when I sit on a regular chair. The nighmare of climbing onto a bar stool. Never being able to get anything of the top shelf without parental assistance or not knowing how bad my regrowth actually is.
Being called cute, as a result of being short is just frustratingly cliche, and never gets you anywhere. At least not a second date.