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This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Natalie Reilly's Substack. Sign up here .

Jack Antonoff appeared to endure a certain karmic rectitude this week.

First, he was spotted on route to Taylor Swift's mega-wedding without his estranged wife, actress Margaret Qualley, (where his ex Lena Dunham was in attendance) then came the announcement that he and Qualley were separated after less than three years of marriage.

Watch: Laura and Emily explain the one red flag (or green flag) men can have that's completely out of their control. Post continues below.

The music producer, who's collaborated on roughly 88 songs with Swift, was once considered one of the "good ones" - a type of boneless, non-toxic music pixie who sat at the knee of the singer, ready to transmute her vast talent into synth-heavy hits.

But ever since Lena Dunham detailed the breakdown of her nearly six year relationship with Antonoff in her memoir, Famesick. (Released in April, though it feels like one long, parasocial summer) our ardour has cooled.

Was Antonoff, who resembles an oversized guinea pig, in fact that guy?

And did Qualley read the memoir and decide to take Dunham's side?

Well, hang on, let's give the actress a little more credit: she most likely saw all her husband's issues perfectly articulated in black and white and realised she wasn't alone!

Though just yesterday a rep for Qualley said there were only "two people" in the marriage, which seems like a veiled reference to Dunham but is in fact a denial that Qualley is involved with her co-star of her upcoming film, Drew Starkey.

Meanwhile, Qualley, who deleted her wedding photos from Instagram, has since added one blurred photo with Antonoff back to her grid.

I mean, you know he called her crying, "First Lena's book, now you! The paps are everywhere! It's humiliating, ok? I'm meant to be on tour! I just don't know how much more of this I'm supposed to take, Saisie!"

(Saisie is his pet name for her, according to nobody but me. Qualley's real first name is Sarah and it's my distinct vibe that he'd pull a reverse Tom Holland).

Anyway! It's an interesting spin on an old dynamic, don't you think? Traditionally, when a man takes a wife 11 years his junior, it usually requires more than 3 years of marriage for her to wise up to his complications.

For decades women have been taught not to make a fuss; to be serviceable, to be "cool" in order to capture a man's attention. Stray from this blueprint and you'll be called "high maintenance". The best bet is to be both uncomplicated and pretty - jackpot.

As Dunham wrote in the epilogue of Famesick about "beautiful" Margaret Qualley,

"I wept like a child on the first afternoon I saw a paparazzi picture of them kissing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I knew that nobody would understand why I was so upset, that they'd assume it was because I was jealous of her, and that made me weep even harder."

It's a narrative as old as Helen of Troy (*pulls down glasses, winks*) and despite Dunham's steadfast refusal to adhere to it, she knows what people will think.

Bell Hooks called it "the politics of envy" where women, instead of rising up to defeat the narrow, white supremacist idea of capitalistic beauty standards, instead compete with each other for the prize.

It's what dumb men mean when they say "You girls are your own worst enemies!"

And for too many millennia now, the prize has been some goofy guy who is light on relational skills and heavy on his singular pursuit of what makes him happy, at the direct expense of anyone who dares to demand his attention after the limerence has faded.

If an ordinary woman needs extra attention, say, for a debilitating chronic illness, or a hysterectomy, where is the pay-off for the man? As Dunham ruefully recounts in her memoir, there is none.

She says she failed at this sacred patriarchal rite of passage; the bagging of a sensitive "good guy" by having too many needs.

So when we learned, circa 2021 along with Lena, that Jack Antonoff was dating the actress who personified unattainable youth and beauty in The Substance, we were sad, a little eye-rolly, but not surprised.

Despite not knowing Antonoff at all, we knew this truth to be self-evident: the man will choose the more bendy girl. And "girl" is the operative word.

What did Carrie Bradshaw tell Big right before his engagement to Natasha?

"Your girl is lovely, Hubbell."

She was quoting The Way We Were, the 1973 movie about a complicated woman (Barbra Streisand) in love with a square-jawed jock, (Robert Redford).

Of course it was never going to work out. And yet! There's Harry, (Billy Crystal) a complicated man with unconventional looks, bagging Sally (Meg Ryan) and apparently, this means the stars have aligned. Because who else would put up with her? She was high maintenance!

Dunham has said that Charlotte Brontë's classic novel, Jane Eyre, had a lasting impact on her writing and that it informed her memoir.

In the novel, Jane, who is both narrator and main character, tells us she is "plain" no fewer than 48 times, explaining as much to Mr Rochester, in a monologue where she urges him not to marry the prettier Blanche Ingram, confessing her love for him while simultaneously detailing what she views as their biggest hurdle: that she's smart and soulful but essentially defective.

The miracle of the novel, and why it's so celebrated some 180 years later, is that Rochester marries the plain woman with nothing to offer except her devotion.

Well, that and the fact that she can read everyone to filth.

Listen: Margaret Qualley has finally addressed her split from Jack Antonoff. Post continues below.

Lena has since gone on to a happy marriage but the tongue clicking around Antonoff remains.

We thought he had humility! And yet, here was this woman-child, the progeny of two former models, (Andie MacDowell and Paul Qualley) opening her glossy lips to say, without reservation, that she'd found her person in him.

Was there no justice in the world?

Well, it turns out, there was.

You see, men love to blame a woman for their relationship complications, believing if they just traded her in for a less complex version, they'd be content.

But in his dogged determination to keep putting himself first, the man may stop noticing the world, or the girl he married.

Maybe she has needs and is human, after all.

Maybe, in his refusal to meet the ongoing demands of a relationship he becomes what he set out to avoid: the partner who's high maintenance.

*Of course we have no idea what really went down and all of this is my extrapolaish!

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