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I spent most of my adolescent life trying to appear shorter than I actually was. At 5’10" since the age of twelve, you can imagine my choice of dance partners at the seventh grade socials were fairly limited. In class pictures I could always be found standing in the back row next to the teacher, where with just a cursory glance I was easily mistaken for her assistant or worse yet, a substitute. Due to the conspicuous absence of boys in our drama club at that tender age, I played more than my fair share of male roles, with a poorly drawn ink mustache that usually sweated off by the second act. My acting repertoire also included a tree, a dancing building and other such parts of a similar androgynous nature. Suffice it to say I spent many a night crying to my parents about the utter unfairness of being such a giant, monstrous freak destined to live alone, wandering amongst the redwood trees or skyscrapers or anything else very tall I could think of in my gratuitous moments of self-pity.

“Just wait until you get older, and you get to college, and all the boys catch up. Then you"ll love being tall. You wait and see.” My Dad would promise in between my cries of anguish.

“You never understand ANYTHING!” I would retort, hunching my shoulders over and trying to appear three inches shorter in the mirror. Because of course, dads NEVER understand the colossal magnitude of these things. Like, oh my god!

Still strangely enough, he was right. I did get to college, and the boys DID catch up. Not only that, but my height gave me an advantage playing Division I lacrosse. I found I could gain five pounds, and somehow it dispersed better than some of my shorter friends. I also found, much to the chagrin of those same friends, I could wear those knee length shorts so popular at J Crew, and not look totally ridiculous! Finally, reparations for all those dances I spent lingering by the snack table, stooped over like Quasimoto.

Until now. My husband is a little bit shorter than me. And by a little bit, of course I mean five inches. Okay fine, four and one-quarter inches. (He demands clarification.) He refuses to let me wear any shoes with a heel and has also suggested I cut the bottoms out so my heel makes direct contact with the ground. He accuses me of placing the towels on the highest shelf so he can’t reach them, in order to cut down on the amount of laundry. (I whole, okay, half-heartedly deny this.) He doesn’t like to stand directly next to me in public, preferring instead to stand at an angle. I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t think we are fooling anyone. I’m taller. And everybody knows.

While I spent most of my youth trying to look 5’4", Jeff spent his stretched up on his tippy toes desperately attempting to convince his mother he was not too small to play football. Which, he was. And, she knew. So instead, he joined the wrestling team where he enjoyed an undefeated season. Of course, this was because there were no other boys small enough to be in his weight class, so he won each match by forfeit. And in his class photos, he could always be found in the front row.

It’s obviously nothing short (ha!) of divine intervention that we ended up together. Ballet flats made a fashion comeback during our relationship. We discovered that Sketchers sneakers add an extra inch or so to his height. And we’re a little more strategic in our picture-taking stances these days. But really, I think we just stopped caring what it looked like from the outside, and focused more on what it felt like on the inside. Because really if you averaged our two heights, we’d be 5’7", which is the perfect number our high-school selves dreamed of. Of course, that’s not to say if someday men’s high heels became the fashion, you wouldn’t see Jeff marching around in a pair of stilettos. But for now, we’re a happy, if somewhat lopsided, couple.

And when he occasionally bemoans his, ahem, vertically challenged lifestyle, I just tell him what I’m sure my dad would say.

“Honey, just wait ’til we get older. Everybody shrinks.”

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