Has your partner ever accused you of being, well… how do we put this… completely mental during certain times of the month?

If so, chances are he could be on to something, as a new study has revealed that despite what we think, us women folk actually do treat our partners differently depending on what stage of our monthly cycle we’re currently experiencing.

Researchers at UCLA explored the changes in women’s behaviour toward their partner while they were ovulating. Unsurprisingly, the majority of women acted in an irrational, erratic way towards the men in their lives.

You see, when we’re ovulating our body does a lot of strange things. Our sexual fantasies increase, we start wanting alpha-male types and, weirdly enough, we become better at detecting snakes. As in actual snakes of the slithering variety.

Sorry boys: when ovulating, we tend to get super-critical of our partners

Oh and we also start to re-evaluate our relationship, which means we become far more critical of himself and far more likely to bite his head off if he so much as opens his mouth.

“A woman evaluates her relationship differently at different times in her cycle, and her evaluation seems to be coloured by how sexually attractive she perceives her partner to be,” said Martie Haselton, one of the researchers.

The research discovered that women who had partners that were considered ‘stable’ rather than ‘sexy’ started feeling distant, picking fights and finding fault with their men when they were ovulating.

“Women with the really good, stable guy felt more distant at high-fertility periods than low-fertility periods,” said Mr Haselton.

“That isn’t the case with women who were mated to particularly sexually attractive men. The close of their relationships got a boost just prior to ovulation,” he added.

So basically, the more dependable your man is the more likely you are to be critical with him. Oh well. The next time you snap at him you can just tell him that it’s because technically he’s such a good, reliable partner.

Yeah… somehow we don’t think our fellas would believe us if we said that…