The height of happiness
Whether little or lanky, height can have a profound effect on our relationship with the world. Mark Smith cuts a long story short
The third tallest man in The Netherlands is resting his hand on me, and it feels as if someone has strapped an uncooked 1kg steak to my shoulder. Olivier Richters, 22 years old and 2 metres 17cm in his socks, has spent the afternoon modelling outsized clothes at the annual conference of the Klub Lange Mensen (literally, the ‘club for tall people’). Now, he poses dutifully for photos, spurred on by his father-slash-manager, a man of average height but intense pride, who is distributing business cards featuring snaps of a strapping Olivier, muscles clenched beneath the banner ‘Dutch Giant: Taller! Bigger! Stronger!’
Olivier – a postgraduate student in Information Sciences at the University of Utrecht – goes on to confide, somewhat bashfully, that he is frequently booked for red carpet appearances on account of his extravagant stature, which is extreme even among the Dutch, the tallest people on earth.
Helpfully, Richter senior is on hand to corroborate, with an extensive photo album. Here’s Olivier towering over the original cast of The A-Team. Here’s Olivier on the set of the national lottery show, during which contestants were challenged to guess his height. Here’s Olivier in his capacity as spokesperson for a chain of muscle-building gyms. Height, it seems, is an advertising byword for might.
Behind us, a TV interview with a female delegate is in session. She talks animatedly about the myriad challenges facing tall people – the perilous, low-hanging street signs, the hurtful playground jibes, the fact that, even in The Netherlands, "it’s almost impossible to shop at an indoor market without taking a safety helmet with you" – as well as the benefits ("I’ve never had a bad seat at the theatre," she offers). The news station seems to have dispatched the shortest anchor possible, who cranes his neck for comic comparative effect. The boom mic operator is wobbling perilously on a high step.
Like it or not, we’re fascinated by height, and by the unspoken hierarchy that it may or may not imply. Surely it can be no coincidence that the heroes of romantic fiction are described as ‘tall, dark and handsome’, in that particular order? Participants in the field of online dating – both male and female – are known to exaggerate their height at least as much as they do their salaries. And when it comes to the top job on earth, the American electorate typically favours the taller presidential candidate over his shorter competitor. One question remains, though. Why?
Professor George Maat of the Leiden University Medical Centre may have some clues as to the answer. A lecturer who’s travelled extensively, he was struck by the internationally held perception that Dutch people are on an endless upward vertical trajectory: "It’s very clear just from looking at families today that Dutch youths are, on average, taller than their parents, who are in turn taller than their parents," he reports.
Keen to establish whether this had always been the case, Professor Maat set about investigating the height of Dutch men throughout history, via an unprecedented course of research that evaluated census data, military conscription records and even the measurement of exhumed skeletons from around The Netherlands, some of which date back 2,000 years.
"You have to subtract a centimetre or two," Maats confides of his grave-digging escapades, "because muscle tension fails after death, and the S-shape of the spine flattens out, lengthening the dead body unnaturally." Seems I may have to wait for the arrival of the Reaper before I get my own long hoped-for growth spurt.
To cut a long story short, Maat’s research revealed that, far from growing exponentially with time, the Dutch populace has actually been shrinking throughout the majority of its recorded history – a trend that has only been reversed during the last 180 years or so.
"Even during the fabled Golden Age of economic expansion," Maat tells me, "Dutch people were, on the whole, getting shorter." That’s because, although an increase in height is generally held to be the result of improved childhood nutrition and good health, it took the industrial revolution to bring such advantages to the masses: "Before that point, it was interesting to see that unusual height was an advantage bestowed exclusively on the cultural elite such as Amsterdam’s merchant class." Medieval monks, for example, recruited mainly from the Dutch aristocracy, were on average 2cm taller than the rest of the population: "That may not sound like a big deal, but it is," says Maat.
In the developed world at least, the advent of supermarket sustenance and near-universal healthcare means that, post-WWII, height is no longer a reliable indicator of any one person’s breeding. But our brains don’t seem to have received the anthropological memo yet.
According to Vincenzo Carrieri of the University of Salerno, co-author of the recent study The Effect of People’s Height and Relative Height on Well-being, we’re still hardwired to equate loftiness with loveliness, resulting in a cultural consensus that can have a profound effect on the self-esteem of the individual.
In his native Italy, where a well-known proverb states that ‘half of a person’s beauty resides in his height’ (altezza mezza bellezza), Carrieri set about monitoring the happiness of individuals of different stature, concluding that taller people – young men in particular – were, by and large, more satisfied in their lives, more likely to report positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness, and less likely to report feelings of sadness, anger and stress.
What came as more of a surprise was the discovery that our sense of height is largely relative: "Much depends on your immediate surroundings. People care not only about their actual height, but also about the height of people in their immediate reference group."
All of the above has left me wondering how Dutch society’s shortest members must feel about their place amid the tallest people on earth. So I call Annalies Harenberg, chairman of the 300-strong Belangenvereniging van Kleine Mensen or BvKM (you guessed it, the Dutch ‘club for short people’) to get her unique perspective.
Harenberg has a genetic condition known achondroplasia – dwarfism, in lay terms – and has endured some pretty miserable treatment on account of her 153cm frame: "People sometimes mistake a small body for a small brain; shopkeepers will quite often patronise me, they talk to me as if I’m a young child," she says. Her response? "I give as good as I get," she chuckles. "I can be quite a bitch when I want to be!"
Regardless of the practical challenges she may face, Harenberg, 50, has a fulfilling career as a hospital technician ("the white coat certainly lends me authority") and judges horse-riding competitions in her spare time, having only recently given up the saddle herself. She is happily married to a man she met online ("I told him early on that I was short; it doesn’t seem to have made a difference") and enjoys her role at the BvKM, where she encourages members to take their size in their stride.
"When it comes to self-pity, I think life’s too short," she concludes. A sentiment that most would agree with, regardless of their height.
