» HOLIDAY BREAK UPS

So this morning after a long drive back to my college town home from the city where my parents live, (yay, anonymity!) I got on Facebook in my dorm room and noticed at least 5 "so and so is single" posts in my feed. Wow, I thought, what a time to break up! It always seems to happen that way, doesn't it? Like someone puts a little heartbreak in the water source and all the sudden everybody gets dumped all at once. But then, of course, one has to come to one's senses and look at the hard facts.


A good friend of mine brought this article to my attention. It displays a series of graphs that, after gathering "relationship status" info from thousands of Facebook pages, the times of year that people are most likely to get dumped. In case you're too lazy to click the link, here are the graphs and some excerpts from the article.

British Journalist and graphic designer David McCandless used Facebook statuses to put his data together. In fact, he and a partner perused over 10,000 statuses looking for the words "breakup" and "broken up". And that's how they came to the conclusion that people were more likely to get dumped during certain times of the year.

The article goes on to say  basically that the graphs speak for themselves. Building up from the beginning of the year to spring break people break up more and more to, figuratively speaking, "spring clean" their lives to make room for all the steamy, spring flings coming up. If you happened to stay with your beau or lady through the spring, you're likely to stay with them through the year until, the weeks leading up to Christmas. One can argue why this might be so, but you have to look at the evidence and say that probably there are alot of reasons. Maybe cold weather just makes people irritable, and by the time December rolls around they're so sick of their sig-other that they're dying to get rid of them. Or maybe it is, as the article points out, "And if you're dating someone you really can't stand, you'd want to break up with them before Christmas comes around so you don't have to waste money on their present."

Personally, I usually keep people around through the winter months and then finally break it off during the spring. Usually, it happens during April, when I realize that I'm happier without them. But that's just me.


So, kiddies, keep in mind that when you holidy-dump, you become a statistic. And also, put your FB on private.


♥