According to a study commissioned by Barclaycard, the longest a man can be expected to last out shopping is 72 minutes — as opposed to the female average of 100 minutes. Apart from that obvious area, in which women like to take it slow and men are keen to get in and out with as little dallying as possible, this piece of research gets you thinking about all those other occasions when men’s and women’s ideas of time well spent are way out of kilter.

In fact, if you look at all the things we argue over, aren’t they invariably to do with time? You say he was happy to spend three hours in the pub rather than get home to help you put the children to bed; he says we were an hour late because you spent two hours getting ready. You say he could have taken a quicker route to the party, if he’d only taken the last turning; he says you spend all day on the phone to your girlfriends.

It’s all time-baiting. And when he’s nagging you on holiday to do something other than lie on a beach, and you’re bitter that he’ll never talk about his feelings — that’s to do with time as well, or our very different ideas of what warrants our attention. In case you’ve forgotten how it goes, here are the top time-clash areas:

The social postmortem

On top form, a woman can happily spend an hour dissecting the behaviour of friends and family, who said what to whom, etc. Men can do 15 minutes, if they are trying to get you into bed. Otherwise, they might manage 30 seconds.

Watching bad television with no sexual content

Women have a terrific appetite for rubbish television, anything up to four hours straight. Men can’t sit still for more than 20 minutes unless it’s sport, Ibiza Uncovered, Phoenix Nights, etc.

The bathroom

Obviously we like to pootle around for anything up to an hour. If given speakers in the bathroom or an alcoholic drink, you might get a man to hang around for 10 minutes. Ideally, though, he wants a shower and a set of clothes that zips up the back.

The pub

Give a man a pint and a picnic table and he’ll be happy from 7am to 10.30pm. Give a woman the same and she will be restless after 30 minutes, wondering what she’s going to drink next, given that she’s not mad about beer and on a diet.

Cooking

Men think cooking is the new sex and are willing to prepare the ground, literally, for hours. Women think cooking is domestic drudgery and consider 30 minutes to be pushing it — unless they are trying to impress someone, in which case, taking the whole day isn’t out of the question.

But there’s nothing that sets the sexes apart quite like sex and shopping. No matter how hard we try to bridge that gap, there will always be suicidal-looking blokes sitting outside changing rooms, and women lying back and thinking, how come the chicken got the 40-minute treatment and I didn’t?

Times recommends

• 12 party beauty tips
• Nutrition: is being big a genetic destiny?
• What it feels like: to pry into other people's lives