Caitlin Hellyer has gotten used to the stares.
She is 24 years old, 1.12 meters tall, and lives with achondroplasia, a bone growth disorder. Her boyfriend, 34-year-old naval engineer Guy Pritchard, is 1.73 meters tall. When they walk together in the Forest of Dean, England, people stop, take photos of them, and snicker. More than once, people have mistaken her for a child. “Sometimes they think I’m his little sister. I’m a 23-year-old woman—how can they not tell?”, she says with a laugh.
At restaurants, they already know the scene: the waiter asks for a “table for three adults and a child”, looks at her, and corrects it to “four adults”. At home, she can reach things on the lower shelves, while he can reach things in the upper cupboards. To get into his Land Rover, Guy has to lift her, and they now treat it as a couple’s joke. They even chose a dog to match her size: a miniature dachshund.
They met in May 2022, after weeks of chatting online. One night, they stayed up until 3 in the morning, and two months later, they were already living together. “We love each other and don’t need to follow a predetermined path to prove it to anyone”, says Guy. “The second time we met, I thought: if this is happiness, I’d never been happy before”.
