FACEBOOK IS ALWAYS watching, you know?
And this week in particular it’s been watching out for all things love-related.
The company’s data scientists have been examining how couples interact before and after an all-important “in a relationship” declaration.
Unsurprisingly, during the flirting phase, they’re all over each other’s Facebook walls as photos are stalked, links are strategically shared and even then most mundane of statuses are ‘liked’.
However, Facebook has now revealed how that interaction quickly falls away after an official “in a relationship” pronouncement:
There’s a peak of 1.67 posts per day 12 days before the couple are officially doing a line, with the lowest point coming 85 days after the “in a relationship” milestone.
Facebook, ever the romantic though, is positive about the reasons behind the dropoff, with data scientist Carlos Diuk saying:
Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world.
Diuk also says that as the online interactions decrease:
…the content of the interactions gets sweeter and more positive.
For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing positive emotions (like ”love”, “nice”, “happy”, etc.) minus the proportion of words expressing negative ones (like “hate”, “hurt”, “bad”, etc.)
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