maintenance

[ajva]

I have been thinking about being 'low maintenance' or 'high maintenance'. I think they are excellent words to describe what it is they describe. I have recently been told that I am (to paraphrase) 'quite low maintenance'. I am pleased. Obviously I can be rude/outspoken/enraged/moany/aggressive etc. But apparently apart from all this, I am reasonably 'low maintenance'.

So I've been pondering - what exactly *is* low maintenance? Does it correlate with confidence? I think perhaps it does. Most people are probably not extremely high/low maintenance, but somewhere in between. Wibbles, for example, seem to be a major factor in increasing what I will call the Required Maintenance Ratio (RMR). I'm always ready to help out with a wibble, of course, and everybody has them (including me). It's just that I don't actually get them all that often. I'm pretty sure a lot of that comes down to confidence/self-esteem.

Also, average female RMR seems to be higher than average male RMR (there are many individual exceptions of course - variation within populations being greater than variation between populations and all that). Indulging this futile statistic for a second, this could be something to do with periods, of course, or hormonal ups and downs. But I also think that's too simplistic. I think there's a huge element of socialisation. Despite decades of gender equality activism, men are generally very much still expected to 'take care' of people, and women to be 'taken care of'. Also, women express emotion more readily. I think these things contribute to differing average RMR ratios between the sexes, and differing average wibble occurence (AWO).

I remember one occasion where I desperately desperately wanted to wibble but didn't want to make a scene. So I decided that I would delay the revelation of my wibble until the next day, when it wouldn't matter any more. It felt weird, but it achieved its purpose. I have a suspicion that many blokes I know tend to repress their wibbles, whereas many of the women don't.

This train of thought is still developing. Please feel free to comment... ;o)

Comments

hmm...

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

I think I'm low-maintenance, except when I'm not. Sometimes you just need support. I'm more concerned with how requests for support are expressed: if someone at a party say asks quietly to go into a corner and be supported, I'll be fine with that.

If the same person just starts a strop about how they aren't supported, I'm likely to have little sympathy. If it occurs to me that in the second case the person is acting like that because they've been repressing their wibble and finally snapped, then I would try to scrape my support together, but my gut feeling would still be "why didn't you just ask?" I think I just have a very low tolerance for psychodrama of any sort. Not sure whether that's middle-class repression or good civilized behaviour. Both, probably.

I wonder if emotional maintenance needs correlate with physical maintenance needs, where I'm pretty low maintenance. conflux once said "One thing I really love about you is how you can get ready for a black-tie ball in under five minutes". After years of my mother and most of society telling me I'd never get a man (man, of course) if I didn't worry about makeup and ironed clothes and not being too forthright, such sentiments were very good to hear.