Spring Break-ups: Graphic of Facebook updates show when people are most likely to end a relationship

By NIALL FIRTH
Last updated at 4:36 PM on 2nd November 2010

A designer who uses hard data to come up with interesting graphics and images has found which points in the year are the most popular for splitting up with partners.

David McCandless pulled information from 10,000 Facebook status updates which used the phrases ‘break up’ or ‘broken up’ and plotted them on a graph.

The Facebook graphic shows most people break up at Spring Break or Christmas

He discovered that there were definite peaks and troughs with a huge number of relationship ending in the two weeks of the aptly-titled Spring Break, a major holiday in the U.S. college calendar which falls in early March.

Other popular times of the year to break the news are over the summer and the two weeks leadingup to Christmas itself.

Romantics will perhaps be heartened to note that Christmas Day itself is the day when the fewest relationships end.

Monday is the most popular day for updating your Facebook status with news of a failed relationship, perhaps after a particularly bad weekend. 

Valentines Day also sees a spike in the number of love affairs that come to a sudden end.

Mr McCandless first unveiled his Facebook graph at a TED talk in August. He has also create graphics which show how much money is spent on foreign aid, or what each country in the world is the number one at – Britain is number one for CCTV.

For those whose relationship has recently ended there is good news from Facebook, which has finally bowed to pressure from users and stopped showing photos of former lovers on people’s pages.

Launched as a piece of harmless nostalgia, the Photo Memories faced a fierce backlash from users who often found themselves confronted with pictures of ex-girlfriends and former lovers who they would rather not be reminded of.

Sam Odio, Facebook's project manager said: 'While users may still see Photo Memories of their former romantic partners if they didn't declare the relationship on Facebook – as well of their current partner with that person's former partners – the change should help heal the heartache for many users.'

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