Let’s be brutally honest. There is a huge disconnect between what women say they want or even think they want and their actual instinctive reactions. Women are, almost universally, extremely prejudiced against short men as romantic partners. And they have some intense positive prejudices too. So yeah, money and status are the ideal ways to overcome the innate loss of value that comes from being short. You body is screaming that you’re not worth considering. Wealth and status are easy shortcuts to getting women to think you are are. And after that it’s up to you as a person. But you’ve got to get your foot in the door before they will even give you a chance.

Now, if you don’t have wealth or status to counterbalance your height, your best best is a slow, targeted approach. Develop your other attributes. Make sure that you actually know what they are (charm, intelligence, humor, verbal ability, creativity, pluck, kindness), and really get to know some girls. They might be willing to accept you more easily as a friend because you’re not viable dating material. And that gives you a chance to reveal the worth that you do have.

As you become more of a distinct individual to the women you get to know, outer proxy measures that people use to quickly judge other people (like height, and even looks in general) don’t become less real or relevant, but they decline in relative significance as the picture of your value becomes complicated by more and more additional factors.

Some women will never get over the height issue. Almost none of them will when it comes to a quick, basic appraisal of the romantic viability of a man. But we all discover things about one another eventually that we aren’t thrilled about, but we learn to ignore them because there are so many other things that we’re focusing on that we like.

The fact is, women are as heavily prejudiced about men as men are about women. Their main differences are their baseline attraction and the direction of their prejudice. The baseline assessment of most men of most women is that they seem pretty good as romantic prospects. And the baseline assessment of most women is that most men are not acceptable romantic prospects. Men have some very strong innate preferences (for beautiful women, mostly), and they’re mostly positive prejudices, things they like. Overall, they’re pretty attracted to most women, and they’re even more attracted to really beautiful ones.

Women, on the other hand, have mostly negative prejudices. Their baseline judgment is that most men aren’t that attractive, and there are certain things that make them completely unacceptable and of no romantic interest. So as a man, especially a man who possesses some of those undesirable traits, you’re in the business of neutralizing objections, finding ways to remove standing indictments against you. Some things, like height, can’t be changed, but you can get the judge to take extenuating circumstances into account and maybe commute your sentence of exile.

It’s very hard to make yourself attractive to women, in general, without some decent reserves of wealth or status to flaunt. Those tend to be the skeleton keys to the chains of your own personal limitations. But you can free yourself to become attractive to some particular women who you get to know and who get to know you by other means.

On a side note, most of the very young are too dumb to have any idea what they actually want or what they are attracted to, and they only learn, if ever, by experience (mostly bad ones). So don’t expect too much of teenagers or even young adults. By the time they’ve had a couple decades to accumulate a history of romantic wreckage, even the slowest students will gradually begin to aquire some idea that they’re not very good at figuring out what it is they really want or need. And even the great youthful romances could be viewed as a pretty bad idea, when looked at with too ungenerous an eye.

Being unattractive for some minor and unalterable reason is frustrating. It is a handicap. And don’t kid yourself that it’s all about confidence or this or that. Most women will never bother looking close enough to see your confidence, or ever see it as anything but silly on a shrimp like you. But in narrow and specific cases where you can broaden the spectrum of information, you can hide it and make them forget it.
And once you have someone who does, you can forget it too. Something so big and impactful to your life suddenly becomes a total non-issue with almost no relevance.

Inside a real relationship, you’ve got so much going on that your height is just a passing afterthought, hardly even remembered by even yourself. I sometimes forget that I’m short, just like I sometimes forget that I’m a good bit younger than my wife (another feature most women, especially young ones, don’t like). I forget that I’m not a great singer too, and bad at team sports, because these things simply aren’t relevant in our day to day relationship.

Other things end up mattering far more, like how good I am at remembering to do things I said I would do, and how patient I am about my wife doing something that annoys me for the seven hundredth time. The fact that I’m bad at both of those things has a much more active negative impact on my romantic life these days than my height.

The fact that I had an unusually clean room (my wife has extremely tidy parents and sees tidiness as a sign of being in control of your life) and an unusually well-decorated room (my wife has a great appreciation of aesthetic and natural beauty) in college ended up being more important and relevant and notable information than my height, which was obvious. And I mostly talked to her sitting down, or over email. We didn’t play basketball. I found a way to move the battle to more advantageous territory. Being short and young was a serious problem, but I found ways to give myself a fighting chance.

The playing field is never even and never will be. Everyone has innate advantages and disadvantages, and everyone has innate preferences and prejudices, many of which are widely shared and some which are very peculiar to the individual. Your job is to figure out what your handicaps are and what your assets are and learn how to tell the story of you in the most advantageous way possible.

Faint heart never won fair lady. That’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s almost tiresomely true. Most everyone is pretty shallow. They have to be. There are six billion people out there and they need to filter the possibilities at a glance somehow. But most people will also look deeper and more complexly, given the right chance and the time and space to take notice. If you can find the right people, and you give them the chance, you can broaden that pool so you can find a place in it. Or at least make it less deep so you can stand. Short stuff.