Facebook knows all about your relationship, whether you believe it or not. It’s true – keeping quiet about your love life isn’t fooling Zuckerberg & Company anymore. Why? Because with close to a billion monthly active users, they have enough data to practically predict what is happening in your love life and when it will take place.
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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin recently summed up all the data they’d pulled together from Facebook’s user demographics and statistics, and their findings were a mixed bag. Take a look at this infographic (Source: World Wide Learn and Mashable) and see if you’re surprised. A few goodies:
- It’s all about roses and mistletoe: The most common dates for new relationships to become “Facebook Official” are February 14th (49% more likely) and December 25th (34% more likely).
- Oddly enough, one of the peak times for break-ups appears to be about two weeks before Christmas, with early spring and mid-summer also proving to be bad juju for love birds.
- Heartbroken people apparently love Drake. The singer scored with two of the Top 5 most-listened-to songs by users who had recently endured a nasty split (“Take Care” and “Crew Love”).
- With married life snagging more and more of the Facebook “originals” (adults who were college kids between 2004 and 2007, at the beginning of the social networking website’s rise), this shouldn’t surprise you: 31% of users are now married.
- 37% of users are currently single (and ready to mingle, we assume), and may or may not be part of the same 37% of users who became single in the year 2011 alone.
- Surprising: People actually tend to take longer to tell Facebook friends about a new relationship than they do about a break-up. You might expect a new relationship to inspire shouting from the rooftops and off-key singing of love songs, but only 38% of users reported a new relationship immediately, while 52% of users wanted everyone to know they were single ASAP.
- However, some things still do not require collegiate level research: Men who posted that they were “In a relationship” reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction (duh), while women who argued with their partner over said relationship status reported lower levels of relationship satisfaction. Mars and Venus – the saga continues.
