Honest note first: there is no breaking news about Shauna Rae today — no new season, no announcement. This is the fan debate that never actually ended.
Shauna Rae was pouring drinks at a charity event when both of her dating lives walked through the door: Thomas, the 4-foot-8 firefighter who shares her diagnosis, and Dan, the Welshman who flew 3,000 miles to meet her. Three years later, fans still argue about which man proved the point. Should Shauna Rae only date someone her own height?
The Firehouse Date That Felt Like a First
The Season 2 premiere, in November 2022, opened with TLC’s matchmakers setting Shauna up with Thomas, a 22-year-old volunteer firefighter who, like her, lives with pituitary dwarfism. The date started with a tour of the Islip Terrace fire department — stepdad Mark drove her, because Shauna could not yet drive herself — and ended with Mark and younger sister Rylee dining at the very same restaurant.
What Shauna said afterward is why the date still gets replayed. She told Entertainment Tonight it was the first time she had met someone with the same condition face-to-face. “It was nice I didn’t have to walk him through” the medical talk, she said. Thomas, at 4-foot-8, stands nearly a foot taller than her 3-foot-10 frame — and afterward she laughed that it had felt more like a firehouse tour than a date.
Team Same Height: Nobody Has to Explain Anything
Team Same Height starts from that Entertainment Tonight quote. For a woman who has said suitors study her “like I’m a specimen in a lab” — and who has spoken about surviving an abusive relationship at 18 — a date who already knows the medical history is not a small thing. It is the whole evening, handed back. On the date, Thomas told her he does not let other people’s cruelty define him.
Team Height Doesn’t Matter: The Welshman Who Flew 3,000 Miles
Team Height Doesn’t Matter answers with a plane ticket. Dan Swygart, 26, an entrepreneur from Ruthin in Wales, watched Season 1, sent flowers, and flew across the Atlantic to meet Shauna in Long Island in December 2022 — no matchmaker, no producer arranging it. The visit played out like a montage: an aquarium trip with her sister Rylee, paddle boarding, and one evening making sushi rolls at her house while Patty and Mark grilled him over dinner.
YOU MAY LIKEThe Baby Cancer Battle That Made Her 3-Foot-10: Shauna Rae’s Full Health JourneyThen the internet did its worst. Dan was branded a “creep” and, according to reports, received death threats — for dating a 23-year-old woman. He answered back: “As soon as you say that she can’t have a real-world connection with someone else, you dehumanize her.” The romance ended quietly — long distance was “not my cup of tea,” Shauna said. This camp says the problem was never the height gap. It was an audience that could not see a grown woman making her own choice.
The Night Both Men Showed Up — and Neither Won
Here is the twist that keeps this debate alive: neither man won. In Season 2, Episode 8, both men turned up at the charity event where Shauna was bartending. The real ending came off camera. According to reports, Shauna has been with a boyfriend since around 2022 — a man whose face stays off the internet unless she is marrying him. On the Unplanned podcast in January 2025, she put it plainly: “No, I live with my boyfriend” — “technically alone,” away from her parents.
That is the detail this camp leans on hardest. Shauna picked her person without a matchmaker, without a height rule, and without the cameras — and the choice has lasted longer than either televised romance. The show sits in limbo since October 1, 2023 — never canceled, never renewed. So the question fans have argued about since the firehouse still stands: does the right person for Shauna Rae have to share her height — or just share her life?
So pick a side. If Shauna’s next date walked in tomorrow — a 4-foot-8 firefighter who shares her diagnosis, or an average-height stranger who flew across an ocean to meet her — which one gets the second date, and which one gets the warning?
