Facebook Knows Your Relationship Status Before You Update It

Facebook knows a lot about you. They did not spy or anything, it is just that everything you share on the social network makes a pretty good portrait of who you are. When it comes to relationship status, Facebook claims they know your future relationship status, before you actually update it!

On Valentine’s day, Facebook published new findings that hints when two people are about to change their status to “in a relationship.”

Facebook claims they know your future relationship status, before you actually update it!

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In the three months (or about 100 days) before a couple updates their status to make their relationship Facebook official, the social network sees a steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the two. In fact, posting to each other’s pages will peak (1.67 posts) at 12 days before the relationships begin and when the update is officially made (“day 0”) posts typically start to decline.

Facebook only looked at couples who declared an anniversary date — and not just changed their relationship status — between 04/11/2010 and 10/21/2013 and remained “single” 100 days before and “in a relationship” 100 days after that date.

Facebook commented in an official blog post:

[quote]Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world. [/quote]

Less interaction isn’t a bad thing, and posts shared tend to get sweeter and more positive following a relationship status update. To determine this, Facebook looked at words expressing positive emotions — such as “love”, “nice” and “happy” — compared to ones with negative connotation (“hate”, “hurt” and “bad”). Check out the graph below to note the increase.

And you thought no-one noticed you liked that girl/boy eh? :P

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