“She crazy.”

I’ve heard that simple phrase sum up entire relationships. While women need to go over every passing remark with a fine-toothed comb, an army of confidantes and a few bottles of white wine to make sense of things after a breakup, men can explain the demise of a marriage in two words.

And here’s the thing: We’re all crazy.

Maybe not in-your-face, commit-me crazy, but everybody’s got a streak ready to expose itself under the right conditions. To quote our cowboy talk, “We all got pieces of crazy in us, some bigger pieces than others.”

A girlfriend and I were recently discussing the ongoing question of when in a relationship is the best time to reveal the crazy. Do you let it out early on, to test your partner? Do you let it out all at once, in ultra-intense (but contained) bursts a la Elin Woods? Or is it a slow reveal, sort of like letting the air out of a balloon?

We put that white wine to better use and swapped stories for the answer.

The Tester: I had a sorority sister who, while away for the weekend on a fraternity formal, took a pair of scissors to every picture her date had with another girl. He wasn’t her boyfriend, in fact I think the formal qualified as their third date. To this day the fraternity refers to her as “Slasher.”

The Elin: My boyfriend in college jokingly set a special ringtone for my phone calls for a time — Buckcherry’s “Crazy Bitch.” I don’t know if any one episode caused him to assign me that particular song, but I will say that in the throes of one blowout fight at a tailgate, I sacrificed his favorite beanie (which I had borrowed) when the Porta-Potty I was in ran out of toilet paper. Worse, I took pleasure in breaking our day-long silent treatment to tell him where his beloved hat went.

The Slow Reveal: Also known as the flip-switch psycho, this breed is particularly terrifying. I don’t know any personally, thank God, but think Lisa Nowak, über normal-seeming, accomplished naval officer-slash-astronaut who drove cross country in a diaper to kidnap and possibly murder her boyfriend’s mistress.

Although we catch the most flack for it, psychotic episodes are definitely not exclusive to the female set.

I once had an on-and-off boyfriend pee on my car — while I was IN it mind you — because I refused to give the relationship another go. I remember staring through my activated wipers in disbelief, certain urine couldn’t be good for my paint job and trying to work out in what universe such a reaction would help his case.

We’ve all been there, either as the stage-five lunatic or the object of their affection — maybe both.

So I say go ahead, let your crazy out. Show him that photo album of your cat. Fire off that possibly misguided text. Call a 20th time. As Marilyn Monroe once said: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, than you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”