Last month, the invaluable JES directed me to the endlessly fascinating Information is Beautiful website, where I discovered this graphic representation of the seasonal cycles of relationship breakups. This is based on people's proclamation of their 'relationship status' on Facebook, so although it's a large sample, it's also a rather skewed one - with, I suspect, a heavy preponderance of American college students (hence the major peaks just ahead of the academic holidays).
I was gratified to discover that my own observation on the frequency of breakups around the dratted Valentine's Day is borne out by these statistics.
It's also curious that - throughout the year - Mondays are the most regular day for breakups (or, at least, for the announcement on Facebook of the ending of a relationship that probably imploded because of a fight over the weekend). Combined with the huge seasonal surge of breakups in the weeks just prior to Christmas (fights over whose family to spend the holidays with, or a cynically thrifty urge to cut back on the expense of gift buying??), this leads to the conclusion that today - December 13th - is likely to be the peak breakup day in the entire year (for our young American friends, at any rate).
This should mean that New Year is a prime time to go on the prowl looking for a new girlfriend....
2 comments:
I think you're right about the sample they used for this graph. It probably also makes no allowances for a popular alternative use for the "relationship status": to send a message to one's Significant Other, and/or to someone else with whom you're taking a passive-aggressive approach.
(This info courtesy of various 20-something nieces/nephews who've seen it happen.)
Actually, now that I think about it, that problem must inhere in pretty much all Internet polls: there's no way to be sure that ANYONE is in fact telling the truth about ANYTHING!
Well, using secondhand data is always problematical, but especially off the Internet.
I wonder if Facebook actually made these statistics available, or if the researchers had to find some other way of collating all the figures. I also wonder if, for example, they tried to restrict it to serious or substantial relationships - and exclude the 'players', or those people who may just randomly toggle between 'single' and 'not' every few days.
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