Gary Nourse is a man who really looks up to his wife. Way, way up.
It's not as if he has a choice.
Nourse is just 5 feet tall. Sherri, his wife, measures in at 5 feet, 10 inches - before she puts on high heels.
When they walk down the street hand in hand, heads turn. Sometimes, they're mistaken for mother and son.
And don't let them go dancing. As soon as Nourse puts his arms around his wife for a romantic slow dance, the snickering starts.
"There are idiots out there that just gawk at anything that doesn't look normal," Nourse said. "It really is annoying. She and I are soulmates."
Two years ago, Nourse, a Boston-based engineer, set up a Web site for height-challenged couples called - naturally - Taller Women and Shorter Men. So far, almost 195,000 visitors have clicked onto the site.
"I wanted tall-woman-and-shorter-man couples to come together and know that they are not the only ones out there," he said.
The long and short of it is, they're not. Plenty of couples don't see eye to eye. It's more eye to neck - or eye to chest.
Just as more couples are dating across racial lines, and younger men are pursuing older women, the height taboo is also disappearing. Although it still turns heads.
"It's everywhere. You see it on the silver screen. You see it in music videos. It's a happy cultural phenomena," said Robert E. Rogoff, a 5-foot-4 man who loves tall women so much that he once put out an Internet 'zine called "The Height Report: A Sociological Journal."
Examples of lopsided matchups abound.
On TV's "Ally McBeal," the character played by Peter MacNicol is dating Nell, portrayed by Portia de Rossi, who's several inches taller. And in real life, Nicole Kidman is taller than her heartthrob hubby, Tom Cruise. Model Kimora Lee towers over her hubby, hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons; model Nicole has it over hubby Eddie Murphy; and actress Jill Eikenberry looks down on her actor husband Michael Tucker.
Anna Nicole Smith's late oil tycoon husband, J. Howard Marshall II, probably needed a stepladder to have a conversation with her.
"It's much more socially accepted these days," Rogoff said. "In many places, people don't even pay it a second thought now. I would hope that part of the reason is that it's more acceptable is that as a nation we've become more open-minded."
Rogoff once dated a 6-foot-3 woman, and reveled in all the attention it brought him.
