Facebook: Most people get into a relationship early in the week [Study]

You’re not really in a relationship until you’re FBO (that’s Facebook Official for the uninitiated). We all know that that little relationship status update has become incredibly important, but have you ever wondered when most people make the switch?

Nope? Us neither, but it was clearly on the minds of the Facebook Data Team. The team collated U.S. Facebook data from 2010 and 2011 in a bid to find out “how different times of the year affect the beginning and ending of relationships”.

As it turns out, most people go from “single” to “in a relationship” between Sunday and Tuesday. Interestingly, most breakups appear to take place over the weekend.

So why do these patterns exist? According to the Facebook Data Team, the breakups might be attributed to people wanting to spend time with their friends or go out socialising after splitting up with someone.

“Or maybe, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do, and having a difficult conversation has to wait until the work week winds down,” it says.

But what about the spurt of new relationships at the beginning of the week? “That may be a visible echo of the weekend’s festivities — and the new social ties that result,” says the Facebook Data Team. Way to drop some knowledge there Facebook.

The team also notes that there’s a sharp rise in new relationships around Valentine’s Day and the Christmas period.

One interesting stat is that the fifth biggest day for a new relationship is 1 April – which just goes to show how difficult it is to come up with an original April Fool’s Day joke. Unsurprisingly, there’s a sharp increase in breakups on 2 April.

The Facebook Data Team admits that the stats might not be exact, because “some people might not change their relationship status to “Single” after a breakup. Instead, they might opt to hide it from their Facebook profile entirely”.

The stats do, nonetheless, give a fairly good indication of how the progress of the week and the year affect relationships. It would be interesting to see what the global stats would look like.

At this point I’m going to resist engaging some kind of hack-cliché, like revealing my own relationship status.