When Hugh Hefner and Holly Madison split up, it darn-near destroyed our belief in relationships between people with a 54-year age gap.

It hasn’t, of course – which is why we’ve still got the horn for Fidel Castro – but it did come close. For the life of us, we couldn’t work out why the pretty young topless model Playmate Holly Madison split up with a wrinkled old almost-dead pensioner like Hugh Hefner.

And now we know. Speaking about the split, Holly Madison has said that she ended things with Hugh Hefner because he was so ‘high maintenance’. And, coming from a woman who looks like she needs six hours each morning to paint herself exactly the right shade of orange transvestite, that must be really saying something.

It’s never hard to split up with someone. Finding the right words can be a struggle. “It’s not you, it’s me” would be perfect if it wasn’t such a cliche. Or there’s “I just need some me time,” except that tends to make you look like the planet’s biggest twat.

There is always “You’re just too high maintenance for me,” though, which is perfect – an equal mix between vague and scathing. Call someone high maintenance and, while they’re busy picking apart their personalities, you can skip away without revealing that you’ve actually been having it off with the girl from your badminton club.

The genius of the high maintenance accusation is paying dividends for Holly Madison. Although she found fame as Hugh Hefner’s number one girlfriend for over a year, Holly Madison recently dumped Hefner and left him heartbroken. Why? That’s right – because Hugh Hefner is apparently high maintenance, as the New York Daily News reports:

Hugh Hefner’s former No. 1 girlfriend is excited about her future dating prospects – just as long as they’re not like her famous ex. “It might be refreshing to date someone who is not high maintenance,” Holly Madison told “Extra” in an interview set to air on Wednesday. “Sorry, Hef … I love you, but you know you’re high maintenance.”

But what does Holly Madison actually mean when she says that Hugh Hefner is high maintenance? We’ve rattled Holly’s statement through the Hecklerspray Truth Computer, and here are the options it threw up:

1 - Holly Madison would like a boyfriend who doesn’t need to have his food cut up into little chunks before he can eat it and, ideally, is able to wipe his own bottom.

2 - Holly Madison would like a boyfriend who is able to get an erection without pharmaceutical assistance, three hours of manual coercing, a winch and the song We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn played on a loop.

3 - Holly Madison would like an elderly millionaire boyfriend who’s at least willing to pretend that he knows why she’s with him and is prepared to write her into his will accordingly.

But regardless of the reason behind the split, we hope that all this new freedom has made Holly Madison happy, and that she’ll soon be able to settle down with someone less high maintenance. Someone like her current squeeze Criss Angel, even though he looks like exactly the sort of man who’d get into a fistfight with you if you used his hair straighteners without permission.

Now we know why Holly Madison dumped Hugh Hefner – he didn’t dress enough like a Poundstretcher My Chemical Romance.

But you know who does? Criss Angel, the magician who’d be just like David Blaine if only David Blaine a) did magic tricks any more and b) constantly walked around in clothes that made him look like an emo weekend dad having a chronic mid-life crisis regardless of how much of a ridiculous tithole everyone thinks he is.

But Criss Angel must be doing something right, because he’s Holly Madison’s new boyfriend. Word has it that Criss Angel ensnared Madison by performing a number of magic tricks that Hugh Hefner could never do, like running up the stairs, doing the Can-Can and getting an erection unaided. But can Criss Angel doze off in an armchair in the afternoon while doing some gentle Sudoku? No he can’t – Hefner will always have that.

Here’s where we’ve been going wrong with the ladies. We’re not in our forties, we don’t dress in an utterly age-inappropriate way, we haven’t got hair that we seem to have copied from a Funeral For A Friend video, we don’t wear so much pretend-Gothic jewellery that we look like a negative of Mr T at a pikey seance, we’ve never had a knock on the head that’s caused us to believe we’re actually the lead character from The Crow and we don’t share a profession with Paul Daniels.

In short, we’re not Criss Angel. Criss Angel is all of those things, and his appeal to women is as undeniable as it is completely baffling. In his time, if rumours are to be believed, Criss Angel has worked his way through everyone from Cameron Diaz to Britney Spears, all with the aid of nothing more than old-fashioned mysticism and a profound absence of self-respect.

And now Criss Angel seems to have moved onto Playboy Playmate and Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Holly Madison. It seems as though Angel’s thing is blondes with big boobs. Antony Worral Thompson must be bricking it.

Anyway, the relationship between Criss Angel and Holly Madison was more or less confirmed at the opening night of his new Las Vegas collaboration with Cirque Du Soleil entitled either Great: Magic Needed To Be More Pointlessly Theatrical, Didn’t It or Sorry You Couldn’t Get Tickets For That Beatles Show: We Hope This Will Do or something, as People reports:

Angel and Madison have been spotted kissing and snuggling over the last several weeks in Las Vegas, but remain somewhat coy about their relationship. “This is one of the most special evenings for me in my life and I can not think of a more beautiful person, a more special person, inside and out, than Holly to spend it with,” Angel said.

That would almost be sweet, wouldn’t it, apart from two main points. Firstly, we could have done without the mental image of Criss Angel exploring Holly Madison’s insides, and secondly it only seems like a couple of days ago that Hugh Hefner was admitting how sad he was when Holly Madison split up with him. It seems a bit thoughtless to rub Hefner’s nose in it by getting off with an emo gimp like Criss Angel so soon afterwards, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, perhaps this is a step in the right direction for Holly Madison. After all, there was a 54-year age difference between her and Hugh Hefner, and only a 12-year gap between her and Criss Angel. Perhaps, with a bit of time and a lot of hard work, Holly Madison will one day be able to reduce that gap to something that doesn’t make us feel a bit creeped out at all. Fingers crossed.