WHY DON’T WE EVER TALK ABOUT HIGH MAINTENANCE MEN?
I don’t really hear the term “high maintenance” bandied about as roll of caution tape on women anymore. I’m not sure when it lost traction, but in the last decade, I’ve heard far more references to women who are “crazy” or just “drama.” Maybe it’s a dated term, as its major pop culture moment comes from (and likely remains for eternity) that scene in When Harry Met Sally.
In it, Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) are both watching Casablanca together on the phone when Ingrid Bergman appears onscreen.
“Ooh, Ingrid Bergman,” Harry says. “Now she’s low maintenance.”
“Low maintenance?” Sally asks, as if she’s never heard this categorization.
He tells her there are only two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance. “Which one am I?” she asks naively.
“You’re the worst kind,” he says. “You’re high maintenance but you think you’re low maintenance.”
When pressed to explain, he gives her these examples:
Harry: You don’t see that? Waiter, I’ll begin with a house salad, but I don’t want the regular dressing. I’ll have the balsamic vinegar and oil, but on the side. And then the salmon with the mustard sauce, but I want the mustard sauce on the side. “On the side” is a very big thing for you.
Sally: Well, I just want it the way I want it.
Harry: I know — high maintenance.
I just want it the way I want it is the most succinct definition of a high-maintenance woman. The what and the how might change (and boy do they!), but it’s all laddering up to the same impossible standard. She’s picky about food, engagement rings, attention, has no chill, is not laid-back. She is not a fun hang, because things have to be a certain way or else. And what’s more, it’s never enough. No matter how much you cater, tend and comply, it’s never ever enough for the impossible-to-make-happy woman.
We all come with certain factory settings. Too much work is totally subjective, and one man’s high-maintenance nightmare is another man’s dream girl. (For what it’s worth, some men totally dig high-maintenance women. They see them more as women who know their value.) But we can draw a few reasonable based on being alive in the world: Generally, women are the ones who are expected to put in a lot of work, or emotional labor, into relationships to keep them going. Generally, men aren’t.
It’s not entirely your fault, guys. Gender programming tells us that it’s a woman’s job to do the work of communicating and nurturing the relationship. And this is a message women receive practically in utero: Be sensitive, kind, accommodating and caring. Put others first. Don’t be selfish by demanding things your way. The only women who don’t get this message are spoiled — that is, high maintenance. Likewise, men are generally not raised to cater to and consider others at the expense of themselves. Be polite? Sure. But make a romantic relationship your main priority? Not so much. Any woman who demands you do? Kind of a nag. Thus the recurring joke: What are the four worst words you can say to a guy? “We need to talk.”
But what all these descriptions ignore is that men do all this, too.
A study a few years back found that roughly 20 percent of women said their man was high maintenance. Those behaviors included: throwing a fit when they didn’t get what they wanted, needing to be told they were loved several times a day, often running late, and spending a lot of time in the bathroom getting ready. They can be exceptionally insecure and needy, consumed with their appearance, jealous, controlling and temperamental.
In recent years, a number of articles have also begun to warn against the high-maintenance man who needs a lot of pampering and attention. Chalk it up to relaxed gender roles, but if a man can be a Groomzilla, you can best believe he can be a handful in every other way.
In other words, yes, high-maintenance people exist, and they are everywhere. Researchers have even come up with a kind of test for people who have a very pronounced Need for Drama (that’s actually the official psychological term). And there’s nothing wrong with calling it out, avoiding it, or loving it until death do you part.
All we ask is don’t make the mistake of applying it to just one gender. If we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that women don’t have the monopoly on being “A LOT.”
