A Short Man’s Guide To Higher Style

My fiancée, bless her heart, towers over me. I’m five feet seven on OK Cupid (five feet six IRL), she’s a lithe five feet nine by bedtime. When she wears heels, we look like the first and last bars of a cell signal. After six years of dating, that vertical disparity isn’t something we talk about much anymore, unless a light bulb needs replacing or we see another couple on the street with similar dimensions. (“Oooh, look—it’s us but white!”) And then we had to plan our wedding. You see, there’s a specific aspect of the ceremony that has me inconsolable. Weddings are an exercise in self-presentation, and the thought of us standing up there at the altar, in front of genetically blessed future relatives I’ve never met (who can all probably dunk), how after the “I now pronounce you…” she would have to crouch down to kiss me like I’m some sort of grotesque frog prince? Not ideal. And so, to mitigate my inane internal crisis, I called in some shoe lifts—hidden foam inserts that would ostensibly bump me up a few Sarkozy-ian inches to make me feel regal, confident enough to perhaps cajole Muammar Qaddafi into a bilateral nuclear agreement with France. So I jammed the things into my shoes and immediately realized they don’t work with low-top anything—your heel begins to peek out like a muffin top—so I had to switch to boots. Walking around in them felt weird; I was like a newborn fawn wobbling about in cork wedges. I decided to wear them around the office as a pseudo-experiment, to see if (1) anyone noticed anything different about me and if (2) they would inspire confidence. (A fun fact about GQ: Everyone is either five-foot-eight or six-foot-five. No exceptions.) I approached a colleague’s desk. Read more at GQ.