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.