Welcome to BAZAAR.com's first ever Period Month, where for an entire four weeks we'll be publishing stories devoted to your period. Our aim is to delve into what really happens during a woman's cycle—and with the help of Flo Living founder Alisa Vitti, we'll teach you how you can harness your hormones as a path to success, power and global change.

As part of my crusade for period positivity, I keep my partner excessively in the know about my menstrual cycle, from its timing to its color. But it never occurred to me that he could use actually this information—until I downloaded the period-tracker MyFLO.

Alisa Vitti, a functional nutritionist, founder of the Flo Living Hormone Center and author of WomanCode, created the app to help women use their menstrual cycles to their advantage. While your standard period-tracker covers your fertility, MyFLO tells you everything from what foods and workouts your body needs to what tasks you’ll perform most productively. It details all your hormonal fluctuations, prompting you to add calendar events that leverage them in five domains: hormones, focus, exercise, food and love.

Along with receiving all this info on your phone, you can opt to have your partner get emails whenever you enter a new phase. Each message contains science-backed sex and dating tips, advice on how he can emotionally support you and sometimes a suggested grocery list.

“Unnecessary friction in any relationship comes down a lot to timing,” Vitti explained to me. She compares ignoring a partner’s hormonal fluctuations to entering a colleague’s office when they’re busy. “If [my partner] comes to me during my ovulation week and he’s like, ‘let’s do a big cleanup this weekend and organize the closets and I’m like, ‘I wanna go out,’ that’s unnecessary tension. We could avoid that because all he would need to know is, ‘I’ll save that for next week when she’s in the luteal phase.’”

"He received his first phase-alert email when I got my period, summarizing it as 'eat salmon and avocado and have sex if you both feel like it'—so he made it his mission to get me sushi."

The emails my boyfriend received described this same idea. "We are all driven by our hormones," the end of each read. "Understanding how they affect your partner allows you to not only to avoid common and often unnecessary relationship pitfalls, but more importantly, gives you a predictable map to plan how to engage your partner so that you win every week with your woman, giving her just what she wants when she wants it."

"Whether or not it works, it's a nice idea," I decided as we read through it together.

"It is," he agreed. "But what if it's wrong? Like, what if it tells me to buy you chocolate and you don't like it?"

"I always like chocolate."

He received his first phase-alert email two days later, when I got my period. He summarized it as "eat salmon and avocado and have sex if you both feel like it”—and made it his mission to get me sushi. I kept vetoing the suggestion because I just didn’t feel like it, but his determination was sweet.

On my side, the app’s “love” section suggested I rekindle our romance by taking time for myself while he has a guys' night, since the hormonal dips can leave you less enthused about your relationship. It was good timing: I had a trip with friends that weekend and was getting tired of being around him 24/7. The time apart helped me appreciate him more when I got back, as promised, though that might work any time of month.

Since I suspected there was more to the emails than he’d let on, we perused the next together over tapas. For the follicular phase, when low sex hormones slowly rise, MyFLO recommended adventurous dates to increase my energy, lots of foreplay to up the excitement and conversations about my hopes and dreams to humor my tendency toward brainstorming. With a glass of sangria in my system, I got excited about the last suggestion, sharing all my travel goals. He nicknamed me “birdy Suzy,” which was weirdly validating. (He had a few drinks in his system also).

To meet MyFLO’s requirements, he took me to a trampoline hall he’d been talking about forever—which I’m glad we were prompted to finally do—and we took a couples’ trip that weekend. Unlike the previous weekend’s travels, which had left me drained, this one really did energize me, especially after more hopes-and-dreams conversations along the water.

The MyFlo app enables you to sync your cycle with your partner.

During ovulation, the app suggested morning sex—since men’s testosterone peaks in the morning and women’s estrogen surges during ovulation, so they match on ovulatory mornings—and heartfelt relationship talks, since high estrogen levels improve your verbal skills. I vetoed the first idea because no hormones will ever make me a morning person, but I welcomed the latter as motivation to tell him I wished he talked more about his feelings.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll try.”

“How do you feel about our relationship?”

“Oh, good, I guess. We have our little fights, but I still love you like the first day.”

All couples should have this conversation every month.

Between this instruction and the idea that you’re most persuasive during ovulation due to high testosterone and estrogen, I got braver about confronting him with problems. When I emailed him about a promise he’d broken, I was pleased to find he didn’t get defensive. He just apologized. But I wasn’t too surprised. I could tell I was expressing myself more clearly and gently than usual.

In the luteal phase, the 10-14 days before your period when you're most detail-oriented and may lack energy because estrogen, progesterone and testosterone peak and then fall, the app asked me to remove an item from my to-do list. I stubbornly refused—only to cancel last-minute on brunch with my partner's family to sleep in. I could hear Vitti saying "I told you so."

"My period is no longer a 'female problem' for me to keep to myself; it is something he embraced—and he embraced me in the process."

Though I didn’t always feel like following My FLO’s suggestions, it didn’t ultimately matter if I wanted the salmon or the morning sex. The point was that my partner offered. My period wasn't a "female problem" for me to keep to myself; it was something he embraced—and he embraced me in the process.

Women get bombarded with advice on how to please men, but for equality’s sake, they need tools like this to please us, too. And equality is what My FLO’s after.

“Since women are not tapped into their preference fluctuation, they take what they get,” Vitti laments. “Whatever the partner’s giving, they kind of just go along with that and don’t really source their own preferences. I hate to see that.”

Vitti believes we already cater to men’s 24-hour hormonal cycles without even realizing it, from welcoming their morning advances to leaving them to their man-caves at night. But when women’s partners—male or female—have more information, they’re usually eager to do the same for them.

“We should be doing what men have been doing forever, which is supporting different shifts,” Vitti says. “And we should play to those strengths because it’s just good science. It’s just good logic.… I think more visibility into our biological reality makes us feel more connected.”

Suzannah Weiss is a freelance writer, certified sex educator, and sex/love coach whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and more