High Maintenance

Over the holidays a conversation started brewing with my fiancé’s family after a member was jokingly called “high maintenance” but it started a topic that sparked significant interest.

Immediately after the comment “Has anyone ever told you you are high maintenance” was thrown across the porch between cousins we all braced for impact. It was met with laughter but also defense. Because of course it was? It is rare to hear a retort to that accusation without self defense.

And I’ll bet as you envision this scenario you are assuming the comment was thrown from a man and landed on a woman.

It was.

After hearing the rebuttal I chimed in (because I simply cannot help myself) and said “I think High Maintenance is a term we have deemed negative but it is actually just that you are strict about your standards” hoping to stick up for my fellow female soon-to-be cousin. And I meant it.

And then another cousin said “I think all women are high maintenance because they have more they have to be concerned about.”

Interesting. Much to unpack.

Another “Women have to do so much more because of societal pressure so we are forced to be high maintenance.”

My fiancé, “if you perceive someone as high maintenance they are only high maintenance to you because they are an inconvenience to you.”

Ope. Too stunned to speak.

I looked over at him wide eyed as if to say “did you just break open the secrets to the universe.”

The group continued on with a chuckle, and in somewhat unison, all moved on with an unspoken “yeah that went right over our heads.”

But I have thought about this ever since. The perception of “high maintenance has become fascinating to me but more than anything left me with the burning question of why it feels so badly to be called that. What are we actually referring to? Are we talking about how we present ourselves, are we talking about having “too much stuff,” are we talking about dietary restrictions, are we talking about what boundaries we have set around certain topics? What ARE we talking about?? Why as women have we felt like we need to be ANYTHING but high maintenance or labeled “hard to deal with.” Why do we feel like we have to go straight to self defense when we actually don’t even know what that means to the individual calling us that?

During this conversation I took a brave self-inflicted endeavor to turn to my future father-in-law to ask if he thought I, too, was high maintenance. Truly for research purposes I wanted to see how he would handle the question. I knew the answer.

Of course he went on to say “well of course! I think all women are high maintenance”

I took no offense because I already knew that. But yet again with the “all women.”

So where do we go from here? It is such an all encompassing → if you are a woman you are inevitably labeled this.

Do we lean in and take it as far as it we can to prove a point?

Try to be less full of so called maintenance? Be…..less? Oof I am so sick of that one.

Or do we turn to radical acceptance and change absolutely nothing? Ding ding ding!

Change. Nothing.

I truly do believe what I said right off of the bat. It is about having high standards. Not just about yourself but the world in which you have created for yourself. You could consider this to be a really sad observation of men’s thoughts about women or we can all declare that without our forces in “maintenance” there is no taste, no standards, no systems, no communication, no flow. And honestly if they don’t understand that does it really matter to you what they think???

Women drive the ship here. The men can joke all they want but without our high expectations of maintenance the very fact those men exist at all is well…because a woman was high maintenance enough to carry them for 9 months. Making every last bit of that body in which they inhabit for 9 months but also made sure that the STANDARD in which they lived outside of the womb was adequate for their survival to then be able go out into the world 18 YEARS (at minimum) later as an adult and take care of themselves based of that standard. A woman’s “maintenance” did that. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Without turning this into a full blown women’s empowerment piece (it already is who am I kidding) I do think this was a really interesting petri dish to be swimming in. I don’t have a single ill feeling toward any of my soon-to-be family members whatsoever. We had great discussion. I tend to look forward to conversations such as these with family. I wait, hoping, someone is going to crack open a juicy topic such as this.

My father-in-law actually took me aside and made sure he hadn’t hurt my feelings the night before by saying I was indeed “H.M” as he calls it now. To which I responded with a resounding and boisterous reply of “Of course not!!” Because that is the truth!

I think being offended by this topic is a ship that sailed for me a long time ago. I am 100% okay with being labeled “high maintenance.” I truly do not give one single frick frack patty wack if someone thinks I have a high standard. In fact I HOPE they know that. I would have been horribly disappointed and felt misunderstood if my father-in-law had looked at me and said that I wasn’t, because to me that sounds like I lack standards or understanding of myself. That might be my greatest fear now that I say it out loud…

In short I think wearing a banner of pride when being deemed as *High Maintenance* might be the one way ticket out of this whole topic. Resolve it to say I have rarely heard woman call another woman “high maintenance” so we know where the shots are coming from but maybe we need to just simply put the whole topic to bed when we retort with “Yeah, I am high maintenance and I am so glad you noticed.”

That’s it,

Lou

Sidebar: I found tremendous enjoyment in finding ironic pictures to go along with this piece.