Low Maintenance Is Not A Virtue

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Harry: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.

Sally: Which one am I?

Harry: You’re the worst kind. You’re high maintenance, but you think you’re low maintenance.

And thus began the introduction of a poison word into the lexicon. I don’t blame Nora Ephron. And no one in their right mind would ever blame When Harry Met Sally (it was the staple romantic film of my youth), because that movie came out in 1989, and the use of the word “high-maintenance” in this film is not the insult it has become. Although I guess the film will have to assume some of the blame. The Atlantic has written about how that movie helped cement the “high-maintenance woman” as a reductive cultural type. But, in my view, in the film, Harry’s use of the word is actually his unconscious profession of love for the frustrating but irresistible woman in front of him. He’s pretending he’s irritated, but he loves the way she orders and asks for everything “on the side.” He loves that she is her own person and that she asks for exactly what she wants.

Sadly, within only a few years, the word “high-maintenance” was hijacked from a Gen X classic and has emerged as a very heavily gendered slam for any woman who actually has the nerve to ask for anything. And I’m not talking about “calories on the side” kind of requests, I’m talking about basic, human entitlements that women are supposed to tuck away so as not to inconvenience anyone.

Has that word been tossed at you? It’s been tossed at me, and I think it is particularly damaging for Gen X women (which we will examine later, and it’s not pretty). I find it the most infuriating, hurtful, and cruel word that anyone could use to describe me. It happened to me last week, and this time, as the poison was spoken into the heated air of the conversation, I swallowed it whole, and it came very close to blowing up the entirety of my future plans. The poison has lingered, and I’ve spent the last week trying to understand how a single (okay, it’s two, but can we count it as one) word can cause so much damage.

What the word actually does

The first thing I’ve come up with is that it converts a woman’s genuine, baseline needs (the bar is so low I could trip over it) into a character defect. That’s the trick. A need walks in the door, and a defect walks out. Talk about sleight of hand.

Look at the asymmetry that has built up around this word. A man with exacting standards is particular. He is disciplined. He is serious. He is a perfectionist. He is hard to please, which, in a woman, is a sin, but in a man, sounds like a credential. He is demanding, but brilliant. He is a man who knows what he wants. He is high performance.

A woman with exacting standards is high maintenance. She is needy. She is difficult. She is spoiled. She is dramatic. She is princessy. She is a lot. She is too much.

Same behavior. Different moral story.

And the dramatic irony is that the women on the receiving end of the second list are often the ones doing the maintenance for the men on the first list. Women maintain men constantly. We were trained to do it (emotionally, logistically, socially, sexually) and yet men experience women’s parallel need for support as excessive. Tossing out the word High maintenance is the social weapon used to shame women for needing the same emotional care they are expected to provide without acknowledgment. That is a reversal of debt. It takes the woman who has been doing the unpaid emotional labor for years, and recasts her as the expensive one.

The phrase is not descriptive. It’s prescriptive. In the years since Harry used it affectionately toward a woman he adored, it has been morphed into an insult that produces a specific kind of woman. She’s the one who needs almost nothing, who carries the emotional weight, who soothes the edges of the anger, who apologizes to keep the peace, who absorbs the silence, who would rather suffer in private than risk the label. The word builds her. And then someone uses the word to punish her if she ever steps out of what that word built in the first place.

Why Gen X women in particular

For Gen X women, that label hit a generation raised under a particular emotional regime.

• Don’t make a fuss.

• Be independent.

• Figure it out yourself.

• Don’t be needy.

• Don’t expect anyone to arrange the world around you.

Most Gen X women were raised to pride ourselves on being low-maintenance. We wanted to be the cool girl or the capable daughter. Gen X’s branding of female competence came wrapped in anti-neediness. I don’t need much. I can handle anything. It was a brand identity before we even knew what building a brand identity meant.

Gen X grew up during rising divorce rates, more mothers working outside the home, and far less supervised childhoods. The “latchkey kid” archetype gets overused, but it points to something real: children, including girls, were expected to manage more on their own. I mean, come on, we were babysitting infants at age 10!

Then we came of age inside the postfeminist “you can have it all” culture, which added a nastier double bind. We were expected to be ambitious but not aggressive, attractive but not vain, independent but not cold, sexually available but not needy, and successful but not inconvenient. Research on gender stereotyping continues to confirm what we already know: women are penalized the moment they violate the expected combination of warmth, agreeableness, and role conformity.

So high maintenance became a very efficient form of social control. It said:

• Don’t ask for too much, or you’ll lose your desirability.

• Don’t be particular, or you’ll become a joke.

• Don’t require care, or you’ll hear that word.

And the trap of our own Gen X making is that we who succeeded at being the opposite of high maintenance (the ones who trained themselves into requiring nothing but the prize of a man) become the most needed and the least met. This is us in midlife...we have proven, day after day, through decades of evidence, that we require nothing. So nothing is offered. And when, after years or decades of carrying the load in silence, we finally ask for what we need, even softly, even reasonably, that word comes back out. High maintenance. The word is the failsafe. It resets our right to reasonable expectations to... zero.

I have struggled with why being called high maintenance feels like failure. And I’ve figured out that, for Gen X women, it doesn’t just mean you are asking for too much.

It means you have failed at being easy.

And for Gen X women, that hits a deep wire. Because many of us were trained, directly or indirectly, that being easy was part of being good.

Easy daughter. Easy girlfriend. Easy wife. Easy employee. Easy mother. Easy guest. Easy traveler. Easy patient. Easy customer. Easy woman.

Low maintenance became a kind of virtue costume. You could wear it and feel strong, cool, resilient, independent, even superior. I’m not like those women. I don’t need much. I can handle anything. But the bargain was brutal. Because underneath low maintenance, what is happening is this...

“I will shrink the evidence of my needs so no one can accuse me of being a burden.”

So when someone calls you high maintenance, it doesn’t merely insult your behavior. It threatens an identity you may have spent your whole adult life building.

• I am capable.

• I am reasonable.

• I am not spoiled.

• I am not needy.

• I am not one of those women.

• I am easy to love.

• I am worth keeping around.

That is why it can feel like failure. The word isn’t reaching for your behavior. It’s reaching for the version of yourself you built to be successful as a woman who was reared in the 80s.

Accurately maintained

So what’s the move, then? The reclamation isn’t to make yourself more difficult. The reclamation is to notice what the word is actually protecting, an arrangement. When someone reaches for high maintenance in the moment a woman asks for something, they are really saying: please go back to needing nothing, because needing nothing is what makes this work for me. The word is a request to restore service.

And it’s worth noting: the culture has given men a ready-made insult for women’s needs, but it has not given women an equally acceptable language for men’s emotional dependence. What do we call a man who requires constant soothing, admiration, patience, explanation, reassurance, domestic support, social planning, and emotional interpretation?

Usually?

We call him father, boss, brother, husband.

The better aim here is to become accurately maintained. That means you know what you require. You can distinguish preference from need. You don’t outsource your regulation to everyone else. You also don’t pretend you’re a houseplant that survives on indirect light and the occasional compliment.

The deepest part of this, for me, is the recognition that the exact word being used to shut me down is the exact word that built this version of me that is getting shut down.

Which brings me back to Sally.

The reason I can’t bring myself to fully blame Ephron is that the film, in its closing minutes, does something extraordinary. Harry runs through the snow to find Sally and lists, out loud, every particular thing about her that he had spent the whole film calling annoying.

• I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out.

• I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.

• I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts.

But watch that list closely. It is a love letter to a woman’s traits. It’s a recognition of her individuality, her quirks, and fastidiousness. In 1989, “high maintenance” just meant fussy, and Ephron made a list of the fussiness and called it lovable. Case closed. It’s a romantic comedy, for God’s sake, not a social treatise.

But maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess if Ephron had made that list of Sally’s needs instead of quirks. I love that you needed reassurance after that fight. I love that you asked me to come home earlier than I wanted to. I love that you shared with me what you couldn’t carry anymore.

That speech doesn’t exist. Not in When Harry Met Sally, or in the romantic comedies that followed.

Because the definition of “high maintenance” kept shifting after Ephron put down her pen. It went from meaning fussy to meaning your needs are too much.

Maybe the opposite of high maintenance was never low maintenance. Maybe the opposite was self-abandonment.

And maybe the women who were raised to be easy are finally old enough, tired enough, and honest enough to ask the better question: who benefits from me needing so little?

JOURNAL PROMPT

Make your own list. Easy ___. Easy ___. Easy ___. Write it until you run out. Then circle the role you’ve been performing the longest, and ask her one question: what do you actually need that you have never asked for out loud?

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