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by Adrien Friggeri, Facebook Data Science

This week, Facebook Data Science is shipping love in the form of a series of blog posts. This is installment 6 of 6; see the entire series here! This research has been conducted on anonymized, aggregated data.

To conclude this week of celebrating love and looking at how couples blossom on Facebook, we felt it was important not to forget that unfortunately sometimes relationships go south and people take different paths in life. In this context, we were interested in understanding the extent to which Facebook provides a platform for support from loved ones after a breakup.

To that end, we studied a group of people who were on the receiving end of a separation, ie. who had been in a relationship¹ for at least four weeks with someone who then switched their relationship status to "Single".

For every person in this group, we tracked a combination of the number of messages they sent and received, the number of posts from others on their timeline and the number of comments from others on their own content, during a period starting a month before the separation to a month after.

The following graph represents the value of that weighted interactions score over time, relative to the person's behavior before the separation². We observed a steady regime around the baseline before the day the relationship status changes, followed by a discontinuity on that day with a +225% increase of the average volume of interactions which then gradually stabilize over the course of a week to levels higher to those observed pre-breakup.

This points towards people receiving support from their friends in times where they need it, whether it comes in the form of private messages, timeline posts or comments.

¹ In a broad sense, this includes people from around the world who were "in a relationship", "engaged", "married", "domestic partners", "in a civil union", etc.

² The baseline is defined as the mean of the metric (after a 95% Winsorisation) over the entire month preceding the breakup.