The Height of Romance

I caught up with some old friends on the weekend – they’re one of the couples that I know who met online. They don’t tell a lot of people how they met, because they’ve been together since before internet dating was the norm, so they still have that residual nerdy embarrassment about meeting on the internet that they find hard to let go of.


The first thing you notice about this couple when you meet them is that he is a hell of a lot taller than she is –about a foot and a half taller. Which is fine, of course – but it got me thinking. There seems to be some sort of unwritten rule that says that the man must be the same height or any amount taller than his wife/partner, and never the other way around. How often do you see a couple where the man is shorter than the woman?

It must be a throwback to all those old-fashioned traditions in which the man is the dominant partner. Maybe it’s because men are supposed to be the hunter-gatherer, and how can you be the provider and protector for the family if the ‘homemaker’ of the couple makes you look like a midget?


The reason I got thinking about this is that this couple didn’t meet through a dating site or anything; they just met randomly on a chat site. So when they first started to get to know each other, they had that magical internet blindness which means that he could just as easily have been a foot and a half shorter than her rather than a foot and a half taller. What then? Does that sort of thing come up in conversation? Or is everyone like me and imagines that everyone they talk to online is the exact same height as them and has an Australian accent? (I also imagine everyone as a brunette, but I’m not sure that that’s entirely relevant here. Or normal.)

Could you get all the way to the point of falling in love and flying across the country/world to meet up only to find that your future wife is so tall that you have to shield your eyes from sun glare when looking into her eyes? Or is there some deep inborn sixth sense that means that you can never fall in love if you’re taller than the man you’re getting to know?


I’ve actually had a bit of experience with this height issue thing. I once dated a guy who was a hell of a lot shorter than me – probably about an entire foot shorter. He was a pretty muscled up kinda guy who was training to be in the armed forces, so I never felt like I was the huge giant who could overpower him, but it was still kinda weird. And I could never wear heels when we went out, which I hated and which was possibly the downfall of our entire relationship. Wearing heels makes you feel hot and makes you want to dance more. But dancing is kind of weird when the person leading is shorter than you are.

I couldn’t have gone the rest of my life wearing flats everywhere and sitting by watching other people dancing. I mean, there are lots of songs with lyrics like ‘You make me feel like dancing’, but not a whole lot like ‘you make me feel like dancing but I can’t because you also make me self conscious about my height.’ Besides being overly wordy, if that were a song it wouldn’t be a peppy love song, it would be a tragic country song.


This brings up other questions too – like what about gay couples? Is it weird for one of the guys being shorter than his partner? And what about people with dwarfism? Does male versus female height matter when you’re both shorter than most other people already?


Is it really only possible to fall in love with a man that is taller than you are? And could an internet romance be ruined just by finding out that you were taller than he is? I have to wonder if my friends would still be together if the height difference was reversed. I‘d like to think that it wouldn’t matter, but to be honest, I would be miserable if KJ weren’t so much taller than me that I can wear heels and still be the shorter of the two of us.