Pictures of Sophie Dahl and her boyfriend, jazz musician Jamie Cullum, are deemed insufficient, by certain newspapers, to ram home what an unnatural pairing they make. The London Daily Mail newspaper called them ”The Little and Large Show”, and the Sun, confusingly, ”Little Dahling”. Even Cullum’s own website says, ”Dates: Sophie Dahl (seven inches taller)”. Not ”Dates: Sophie Dahl (posher and more bohemian, but nevertheless a nice match temperamentally)”. Not ”Dates: Sophie Dahl (probably earns more, but on balance, might find she has fewer earning years)”.
There are all sorts of inequalities within relationships, and sometimes, unavoidably — a pox on you, modern times! — they will be in the woman’s favour, but nothing so unfailingly tickles the world as the woman being taller.
This is a bit of an issue for me, since I am quite tall at 5ft 10in; not freakishly tall, but tall enough that some men have, tragically, been off limits because I worried that I might scare them. I can, therefore, point to a refinement within the ”fella should be taller” rule, closely observed over a period of decades. If the woman is tall and the man is incredibly beefy, so that their weight differential is stacked conventionally in his favour, that will raise very little remark. So, even though Nicole Kidman is substantially taller than Tom Cruise, she is so waif-like that society as a whole wasn’t that bothered by their marriage; Katie Holmes, just by virtue of her broader frame, has suffered more ”look at your squitty husband” mockery.
The same is true of the Dahl/Callum union, which would be a lot less commented on if he weren’t a slight wee thing and she weren’t so Amazonian. The underlying thinking is not about height, therefore; it is ”Who can overpower whom?” Weirdly, we still require men to be able to dominate their partner physically, even though there is no place for that in a modern relationship.
It’s hard not to be sucked into the idea that a woman larger than her boyfriend looks ridiculous, even having fully examined the faulty thinking behind it. I once went out with a guy of 5ft 6in and sought to combat feelings of unfeminine giantitude by overfeeding him and making him incredibly fat. This did not, in the end, make me look any smaller — it just made him look fat. He’s moved to Alabama now. — Â