“Are You Together?”

What is so different about us as a couple that elicits this reaction? It’s simple: I’m taller than my husband. Not just “taller when I wear high heels” (which I never do); even in stocking feet, I am more than a few inches taller than he is.  When we got married, I came up with a brilliant plan to address the discrepancy: when we grew old, I would be the one to shrink and he would stay the same, so we could eventually meet in the middle. But “man plans and G-d laughs”— while I haven’t lost even a centimeter of my five-foot-seven-inch height, my husband has started shrinking. (If it seems like a particularly fanciful plan, please bear in mind I was only 18 when I formulated it.)

The people who don’t know us can’t get their heads around the fact that we are a couple. We don’t “match.” Our being together puzzles them.  It seems to challenge the natural order of things. “How could they have chosen one another?” is the unspoken sentiment. And I think this is what bothers my husband.  But what seems strange to others is normative for us. When our boys were little and they would draw our family, the stick figure with the skirt was the tallest.

We only became observant soon after we were married, and sometimes speculated how our lives might have unfolded differently had we both been raised in religious homes: I would have gone to a Bais Yaakov rather than French private school, and my husband would have learned in yeshivah. I might have taught Chumash, rather than English. He might have given a lively daf yomi shiur (baruch Hashem, our son Shmuel does).

Perhaps with greater knowledge, we would not have made as many mistakes; certainly, we would not have felt that we were playing “catch-up” with our learning for decades. But we both know that had we been frum before we got married, no one ever would have put us together. This could only be the work of the Ultimate Shadchan.