The attracting girls bit for me to get limb lengthening surgery is definitely true yes but not the main reason. It’s just frustrating how I thought I’d be 6’2/6’3 based on how tall my family is, especially my other cousins and with confidence I’d be way taller than I am now but nope.
Those 165cm men without issues, what age are they and what region do they live in? Because genuinely I’ve been struggling with the height thing now. I approach girls in the 4, 5 and even 6 foot range but it’s usually that oh you’re a bit too short for me.
No one can really advise you on whether you should or should not get this surgery. Asking such a question on a forum like this is often counterproductive, in my opinion. This is a very personal matter and it is based on your own opinion and feelings. Nobody knows how you feel everyday (only you do).
The decision to get the surgery or not really comes down to the level of anguish that your current height causes you and how willing you are to go through the CLL process (and how well you understand it). And once you do decide to get the surgery, the next step is doing it in the safest way possible, with the safest surgeon possible, that meets your timeline/ budget.
I was a similar starting height as you (roughly 175 cm) before I got surgery the first time. It changed my life in terms of how I felt about myself. But my height was NEVER a barrier to me dating women. I frequently dated women much taller than me (180-185 cm) even when I was only 175 cm. And I lived in VERY tall countries (Latvia- statistically it has the tallest women in the world), where my height probably should have been a significant barrier to dating, but it never was, because I never made it a problem. So my reasons for doing the surgery were more to stop worrying about my height so much and to be able to live my life without constantly having those feelings in my mind. I wanted to live like an unchained man free of the shackles that height dysphoria caused me in my mind. I never did it to improve my dating life.
Of course, nowadays it has improved my dating life because I am attracted to taller women, and being 188-189 cm tall pretty much means that I can date VERY tall women without any issue at this point. But again, that wasn't why I did CLL.
You should keep in mind that research has proven that while women do care about a man's height, they predominately just want a man TALLER THAN THEM. So if we are talking about a woman who is 168 cm she will probably be equally satisfied with a 178 cm man (like you) as she would be with a 188 cm man. Both are taller than her and are thus suitable candidates (from a height standpoint alone).
The rest of it comes down to how confident you are in yourself, how good you are at building attraction/ comfort with her, how well you overcome her "tests" (all women test men), and various other factors that are way outside the scope of limb lengthening. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that if a woman ever says you are "too short" for her, she is just testing your confidence level. If you brush that off with a joke and just continue the interaction in a playful manner, she will probably love it and not care about your height. I would have tall women telling me I was "too short" for them all the time, but then they still dated me after I brushed off their comment playfully and demonstrated to them that the height difference didn't bother me one bit. In fact, that turned them on quite a bit, because most men would react to such a comment by getting depressed or angry. Why was I different? It made them want to get to know me better...
You are a good height (178 cm is a good height and above average in the UK), so the height comments towards you (in your case) is probably just her way of seeing if you are confident enough to handle her emotions, so she knows if you are worth investing those emotions and attraction into you. Don't worry so much about it
But if you still want to get the surgery, I also understand where you are coming from, because the reasons for doing it are often very complex. Just please do your research and talk to as many people as possible (former patients and surgeons) before you go through with it. Best of luck.