Apparently, ‘break up season’ is not just a general term to use when it seems like all your friends are breaking up with their significant others. British journalist David McCandless used data pulled from Facebook statuses to determine the most likely time in a year for a couple to break up.
The (possibly) surprising answer? It’s the periods around both Valentine’s Day and Christmas. December 11 is even considered the most popular day of the year to break up. So, if you have and your significant other have made it this far into December… at least you have that.
(Psychologists Say That Couples Who Fight Are More Likely To Stay Together)
After McCandless and his colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases “break up” and “broken up” they discovered 2 spikes in break up’s during the year. The first is right after Valentine’s Day, and the other is about 2 weeks before Christmas. But why are these times significant?
Rori Sassoon, a matchmaker in New York City, explains that big events make people double-think how serious their commitment is or ought to be. “People who feel that their relationship has the expiration date—whether it’s before the holidays or after—think, I’d rather just nip it in the bud and breakup,” Sassoon says.
While Psychologist Dr. Dorree Lynn attributes it to the pressure of gift-giving. Â “If you’re not sure, particularly if you haven’t been dating for several years, a lot of people have issues about gift-giving and how intimate the gift-giving is,” she explains.
“They get frightened because they don’t want to put pressure on the other person, but on the other hand they don’t want to feel like a fool giving something and not getting anything back.”
What do you think about this?
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