Ahh, it’s nearly that time of year again. The smells of pine-scented candles and holiday feasts, the sights of lit-up Christmas trees and elaborate Santa decorations, the sounds of mall store cash registers ka-chinging and – sobbing from those were just broken up with because their significant other didn’t want to buy them a Christmas gift? Hmm.
A fascinating little graph from David McCandless’TED Talk has been floating around the internet recently:
This graph indicates the timing of break-ups throughout the year and was calculated by scraping 10,000 Facebook status updates for words like “break up” and “broken up.” A few time periods are immediately obvious:
- Spring Break: The classic breaking up with your significant other prior to a potentially rowdy spring break trip.
- Mondays: There are a number of spikes on Mondays compared to other days – however, this could also mean that break-ups occur over weekends but people are not likely to update their Facebook status until they get online on Monday.
- Christmas: Naturally, the cost of a Christmas gift serves as a good motivator to end a relationship that wasn’t going all that well – with a possible contribution from the family-oriented nature of the holidays and the pressure that induces. It is worth noting that Christmas Day itself has the lowest number of breakups because, thankfully, most people just aren’t that cruel.
All interesting facts, but this data is far from perfect. One of the biggest flaws is that this sample is composed only of users who are willing to broadcast the end of their relationship via Facebook status – which is certainly not everyone. To help round out the picture, I decided to take a look at the internet population’s ultimate confidante, the place we all can go to unload our fears and seek advice: Google.
First off, what do break-up-conscious users search for? The top related queries fall into one of three categories: (1) making the break-up itself as least painful as possible (“how to break up with your boyfriend”), (2) recovering from a broken heart (“how to get over a break up”) and –the most volume of all – (3) getting back with an ex (“how to get your ex boyfriend back”). Far more of the top queries included “girlfriend” than “boyfriend – indicating that women are generally more likely to turn to Google for break-up advice than men.
Is the search pattern different from Facebook? Let’s take a look at 2009:
- Like the Facebook data, both the how to break up (blue) and how to get over a break up keywords (red) see a peak 2 weeks prior to Christmas. The volume goes down during Christmas and then experiences another peak around New Year’s.
- None of the queries see the same spring break spike as in Facebook – which could be partly due to demographics. Conceivably users who announce their break-up on Facebook could be more likely to be in high-school or college (with a spring break) than the general search population. The “how to break up with your boyfriend” query does see significant volume throughout the summer and fall, but this same trend is not reflected in the “how to get over a break up” line.
- The trends for “how to get your ex boyfriend back” (orange) differ from the other two queries. In fact, this term sees the greatest search volume during the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the holidays are likely to have you feeling a bit lonely.
While the Google data is not quite as dramatic as Facebook’s, graphs like these indicate the many roles played by the internet in the world of dating – not limited to confidante, relationship wrecker and provider of first date awkwardness.
