huh.

And I bet Anne's(I should clarify Ms. Rice's) knees don't hurt nearly as often, although something has to account for her continued marketability...

(whimper)

Dude, that was bitchy, huh? And only 40% sour grapes.

Funny as hell, though....

I'm having a minor failure of imagination. Anna, heroine of my current novel, is 5'0". She starts out married to Julius, who is 6'3", and ends up paired with 5'10" Jack.

I've never dated anyone more than four or five inches taller than me, and rarely encounter men who are ten inches taller than my 5'8"-ish. I don't think I've EVER met a man fifteen inches taller than me. So I'm having trouble conceptualizing in my mind what the relative heights of each coupling would look like. It's not like I've never seen tiny woman-tall man couples, of course, but I'm still having trouble figuring out whether I should be thinking of Buffy and Angel, a puff piece they had during recent figure skating coverage of Michelle Kwan attempting to shoot baskets with Karl Malone, or what.

Silly, I know, and I'll figure it out eventually.

I'm 5'2", and spent several years dating a guy who was 6'. I came up to approximately his shoulder, if I remember correctly. His chest was eye level.

Kissing while standing, incidentally, was kind of a neck-killer unless stairs were involved.

At 4'10", I start noticing having to think about height differences when someone is taller than about 5'7" or so. Like, when talking to them, I notice needing to take half a step back and look up to be able to look them in the eye. With a guy at either of those heights, putting arms around each other would always end up as his arm around my shoulders, my arm around his waist. Also, while having an argument while standing up, someone that much taller has a (perhaps unknown to them) advantage, in that just stepping towards me can feel somewhat physically threatening, even if I know this is a person who isn't and would never be in any way a physical threat, just because it's a much bigger person approaching me in anger. There have been times when I've been arguing with much taller friends and had an urge to stand on a chair just to get back to somewhat more even physical territory.

Susan, my brother - when he got married - was somewhere between 6-3 and 6-5 (edit #1: disc surgery, that's four compressed discs, and age have taken about two inches off his height). My pepperpot of an Andalusian SIL is 4-11.

I have no trouble visualising this, none at all. I'm actually kind of sorry that I didn't get to see my daughter and her then-sort of-boyfriend during the brief period of time when she was casually dating Antawn Jamison (edit#2: my daughter is about 5-7. That makes him, what, 14" taller than she is.)

Thanks, y'all--that helps. I was just having trouble because, lacking the experience of spending much time around people more than 6-7 inches taller than me, it's hard to picture things like where I'd come to on their bodies, just how much taller someone needs to be before you don't clear their shoulders, etc.

Couples of widely divergent height have a tendency to minimize the comparison around people. They stand farther apart, avoid slow dancing around strangers, etc. Just my $.02

GUS!

(dance dance dance dance)

(above parenthetical descriptive, not a command)

GUS!