Facebook knows far beyond Likes, Shares, and "what's on your mind," it claims it knows about love too.
Data scientists of the social network have released several posts about Valentine's Day topics and other matters of the heart. The series of studies from Facebook Data Science dwelled on "Love and Religion," "The Age of Love," "Flings or Lifetimes," "Looking for Love," and "The Formation of Love" leading up to the day of hearts. The data scientists used aggregated and anonymized data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users to establish their conclusions.
Love for the long haul?
"By far the most important aspect is the relationship's current age. The more you and your significant other have stayed together, the less likely you two are to split up. It's easy to see why this might be. As the days since the two of you "made it official" (on Facebook) fly by, the relationship gets more opportunities to dissolve. Life circumstances and personal incompatibilities may lead to the relationship ending. Alternatively, maybe your couple is one of the lucky ones and your relationship chugs along to happily-ever-after," wrote Facebook data scientist Bogdan State.
State explained that couples who have declared their love for each other and made it "official" on the social network will most likely stay together for at least four years or the long haul if they manage to keep the fire burning for at least three months.
Facebook data also showed a pattern that the rate of breakups in the United States is highest during the summer plotted against other seasons.
Single and ready to mingle
Another data scientist of Facebook, Mike Develin, listed the best cities in the U.S. that present the best chances of finding "the one."
"...if you're looking to find somebody, cities like Colorado Springs and El Paso have the highest rate of relationship formation. If you're just looking to hang out with single people, San Francisco, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles have plenty of single people and low rates of relationship formation. Also, it of course goes without saying that there are other features you might be interested in other than relationship formation and percentage of single people," wrote Develin.
Facebook also looked into the best places in terms of male to female ratio. Memphis tops the list in terms of the number of single females in proportion to single males. Meanwhile, San Francisco has the most number of single males for every single female.
What's love (or Facebook) got to do with it
The Facebook Timeline reveals a lot when the sparks form between Facebook friends. Data scientist Carlos Diuk explored aggregated data to see the the interaction of would-be couples before and after they agreed to be in a relationship.
"During the 100 days before the relationship starts, we observe a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple. When the relationship starts ("day 0"), posts begin to decrease. We observe a peak of 1.67 posts per day 12 days before the relationship begins, and a lowest point of 1.53 posts per day 85 days into the relationship. Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world," Diuk wrote.
Leading to "day 0," the team also looked into the dominance of positive sentiments expressed by would-be couples compared to the words expressing negative emotions.
There are two other studies conducted by the team that have established low interfaith relationships of Facebook users across the globe and that in about 67 percent of people in relationships, the male is older than the female counterpart.
