Being called low-maintenance on a date used to sound flattering, like “gee thanks, I know, I just always go with the flow.” Then you date for a while and realize it now means that you’re expected to never ask for anything. The idea works great if you want very little inconvenience from a relationship.
A low-maintenance partner supposedly doesn’t need constant reassurance and won’t care if Valentine’s Day involves takeout and a last-minute card from CVS. That can be nice. But if you get too attached to being the easygoing one, you can wind up swallowing every need before it ever leaves your mouth.
Psychologist John Gottman spent decades studying couples in what he called his Love Lab, and some of his best-known work came from tiny attempts at connection. He calls them “bids,” meaning the little moments when one person reaches for the other’s attention. It might be a comment about something on TV or a hand on the shoulder.
In research that followed newlyweds for six years, couples who stayed together responded positively to those bids 86% of the time. Among couples who later divorced, that number was 33%, according to the Gottman Institute.
Being ‘Low-Maintenance’ Might Be Hurting Your Relationship
TikTok eventually turned the idea into the “bird test,” where one person points out a random bird and watches to see if their partner looks. It’s a ridiculous little test, but it gets at what Gottman has been studying for years. “It’s those failures at connection that really are the source of all the arguments we observe,” Gottman told The Globe and Mail.
That’s important if you’ve built your whole relationship identity around never “needing” anything. You don’t ask for reassurance because you don’t want to seem needy, and you let things go because being chill has become part of the deal. Eventually, your partner gets very used to you asking for almost nothing.
Relationship coach Allison Raskin, author of Compulsively Yours, has pushed back on the idea that a good relationship should require almost no effort. “I would argue that no relationship, even if both partners are secure, is ‘easy’ because life isn’t easy,” she told Cosmopolitan.
Real life will constantly demand things from both of you. Parents get sick. Jobs can be pulled out from underneath you. The dog throws up on the rug in the middle of the night. Being easygoing can make a relationship nicer to live in, but becoming the person who never asks for anything mostly makes life easier for the other person.
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