When I was nine years old, I kept a diary. One entry contained a list of four essential requirements for my future husband. Number one was that he wears sunscreen (because naturally, that’s what all responsible men do). Number two, he has a good sense of humour. Number three, he had to be as kind as my grandfather Fred. As the sweetest, most selfless man I had ever met, he was the gold standard to which I measured all men. Number four, he had to be very tall (as a long lanky child, I correctly predicted that I would be a tall woman).
It was a decade later, in the lunch line at a week-long university camp, that I met Josh. I could smell the SPF30 from a metre away. Tick. We sat at the same table to eat, and although our conversation began with lighthearted jokes about our mutual disappointment over the salad rolls instead of a hot lunch and our love for Seinfeld, it soon turned much deeper as he opened up about some serious family health scares and how he’d turned his life around in the last year.
His openness was both confronting and magnetic. While I was a dramatic, bubbly extrovert with my head in the clouds, he was a strong, grounded introvert. But we had the same humour flowing through our veins and made each other belly laugh from that first conversation. Tick.
For the rest of the week, we sought each other out. After dinner one night, the staff handed out Freddo frogs. When they came to us, there was only one left and Josh insisted I have it even though we had already established we were both diehard chocoholics. It soon became clear he wasn’t only selfless around me. He gave his time and attention generously, taking a genuine interest in whoever he was speaking to whether they were a camp cleaner or the guest speaker. He made everyone around him feel shiny and like they mattered. I had only seen this level of empathy in one other man: my grandfather. Tick.
Despite my growing feelings, there was a lingering problem: I was 6ft tall and Josh was a fraction shorter. Could love overlook height? I pushed the thought aside.
At the end of the camp, we exchanged phone numbers. He called a couple of days later and I screamed with excitement. The summer was ours for the taking and we spent every minute we could together with lazy picnics at the beach or splayed under a tree at Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. On New Year’s Eve, we shared our first kiss and the realisation this could be it.
A few weeks into the new year as we were walking in the city centre, Josh stopped in front of a homeless man. Rather than throw money in his jar, he sat down next to him on the footpath, shook his hand and talked with him at length. Then he bought the man a meal and gave him his phone number in case he ever needed someone to talk to. I watched on in awe. Tall stature was attractive, but kindness was as sexy as hell.
When I returned home, I recalled a story I’d heard in Sunday school as a child. It was about how a guy called Samuel chose the shortest member of a family to be king. I Googled it and sure enough, there it was: “Don’t look at his appearance or how tall he is … God does not see as humans see. Humans look at outward appearances, but God looks into the heart.”
If true height was measured not by centimetres but by heart, then Josh was the tallest man I’d ever met. When he proposed nine months after meeting, I said yes without hesitation. My family approved – they could see that in Josh I had found someone like my grandfather.
Twenty years on, kindness and humour have remained the anchor of our relationship. When we became parents, his compassion had another canvas on which to shine. Our first child woke countless times per night for her first four years. Like most couples, we would argue about who should get up, only he would always argue it should be him.
As our girls grew, he not only taught them to be kind to others but to themselves as well. A few years ago, on a trip to Bangkok, we gave our daughters spending money for the markets. Within minutes it had gone, not into a cash register at a shop, but into the outstretched hands of a homeless man on the street.
As it happens, we produced extraordinarily tall, gorgeous daughters who will probably outgrow us both in physical height. But Josh has passed down the height that really matters too, the kind I saw in the boy in the lunch line.
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