Miniaturizing magnonic circuits and increasing their processing speed require spin waves with progressively shorter wavelengths. However, conventional directional couplers rely on the dynamic dipolar interaction between spatially separated waveguides, which rapidly weakens in the exchange-dominated regime. As a result, their coupling length increases as the spin-wave wavelength decreases, limiting further device miniaturization. Here, we introduce an exchange-mediated directional coupler by replacing the nonmagnetic gap between two waveguides with a magnetically modified YIG spacer. The spacer provides a continuous exchange pathway and preserves the splitting between the symmetric and antisymmetric modes at large wavenumbers. We develop an analytical model to describe this mechanism and verify it using micromagnetic simulations. Based on this concept, we design a straight coupler without curved access waveguides, with a footprint of only 400 nm * 30 nm. For a spin-wave wavelength of approximately 100 nm, the device transfers approximately 98% of the normalized output power to the target waveguide. Its performance remains nearly unchanged even when the damping of the spacer is strongly increased. These results overcome the short-wavelength limitation of dipolar couplers and provide a route toward highly integrated magnonic circuits for information processing.