A few weeks before Mia Wilson’s wedding to her husband, she was baffled as a friend suddenly confessed that she thought she shouldn’t marry him after all.
Mia who lives in Brooklyn, in New York, was confused by the sudden declaration - before realising her pal meant she shouldn’t because of their height difference.
It’s an unimportant issue for many - while others feel so strongly about it, they have to let Mia know it’s a problem.
Writing about it in Jezebel, Mia explained: “It took me a beat to realize why my otherwise non-catastrophizing friend was suddenly sure I was going to die in a fire due to a failure of heroism on the part of my incoming husband.
“My husband is 5’5’’ and I am 6’0’’ tall – a seven-inch height difference that wouldn’t be remarkable at all if our genders were reversed, but is apparently very alarming and confusing to some people.”
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But despite her friend’s concerns, this has never been an issue for Mia - who writes about an odd group of people who are extremely bothered that a woman is in a relationship with a smaller man.
In the past, she says strangers have walked up to them in the street, demanding to know how they have sex.
On another occasion, a woman waited until they had finished kissing in a bar before walking up to ask if they were related, seemingly unable to comprehend their relationship.
And when the happy couple announced their wedding in a newspaper - staff were baffled by the photo they sent to illustrate the announcement.
So concerned were they, that Mia described the conversation a staff member had with them, after looking at the photo they had sent in to illustrate the announcement.
“I’m so sorry, but the way you’re positioned in the photo, your eyes are higher than your fiancé’s, and it makes it look like you might be a couple of inches taller than him. Do you have any other photos," she wrote.
“I reassured him that I was in fact taller than he, but by seven inches, not two!, and that I had a whole lot of photos I could send over that illustrated this if he wanted. I was met with complete silence on the line.
“It was probably about ten seconds of silence, which felt like roughly three years.”
Despite all the hassle - Mia reiterates that she doesn’t care about other people’s stereotypical assumptions about height.
She adds: “The truth is, I don’t see my husband’s height, and he doesn’t see mine.
“He is a brilliant, caring, deeply good, deeply funny person. I don’t need to crane my head upward to kiss him in order to validate my gender identity, nor do I need to be perceived as smaller than the person I showed up to an event with to access whatever desired amount of femininity I want to access that day.”
The weirdness people can have about height doesn’t stop if you’re a celeb couple - as Tom Holland and Zendaya know.
Previously, the SpiderMan actress has had to address the commotion it caused, as she's about 5'10", while he's around 5'8.
"It's a stupid assumption," he says. "It's ridiculous. I remember when we were doing the Spider-Man screen tests, I mean, you'd have to ask [director] Jon Watts this question, but every girl we tested for both roles was taller than me.
“And I wonder whether that was a decision Jon had made, there was no-one who tested that was shorter than I was.
“To be fair, I am quite short. So maybe that's a decision Jon Watts made, and something he was aware of, and he wanted to break the stereotype."
