Facebook: 3 Peak Breakup Periods Per Year

by Jordan Yerman | November 2, 2010 at 03:38 pm

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Facebook Predicts the Death of Your Relationship

In David McCandless' TED talk about data visualization, he shows an interesting graph charting relationship- based status updates. Specifically, David McCandless and Lee Byron looked at when people tended to break up with their partners. The graph shows peaks throughout a year based on 10,000 status updates: The CNN article below mentions two, but really there are three.

According to past behavior on Facebook, couples most often break up:

Just after Valentine's Day
Early summer (i.e. Spring Break)
Just before the Holiday Season
Also, the early part of the week is more prone to breakup announcements than the rest of the week.

There are, of course, several caveats. One is that not everyone announces the end of a relationship on Facebook. Also, there was no way for McCandless to know exactly how long people tend to wait after a breakup before announcing the change. Hours? Days? Weeks?
Also, what about those who euphemize? Or cuss out their exes?
Those peaks are probably not quite as high in real life as they appear on the graph. Still, the point of the talk is not only how visualization makes abstract data not only understandable but aesthetically pleasing, but how we, as viewers and readers, grow to expect such visualization.

In the talk, McCandless said he and a colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases "breakup" and "broken up."
They found two big spikes on the calendar for breakups. The first was after Valentine's Day -- that holiday has a way of defining relationships, for better or worse -- and in the weeks leading up to spring break.

Teh Facebook element of the TED talk starts at 6:15.