Facebook Knows When You'll Get Dumped 474
Pickens writes "Cnet reports that according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up, there are three big spikes on the calendar for breakups — just after Valentine's Day, just before spring break and two weeks before Christmas. British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart after scraping 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases 'breakup' and 'broken up.' 'Might I suggest that, immediately after Valentine's, some women might be casting men from their sight, appalled that their lovers could think of nothing more romantic than roses from the supermarket and dinner at Outback Steakhouse,' writes Chris Matyszczyk. 'Continuing with this obviously accurate analysis, perhaps it's men who do more of the dumping just before spring break, as for some —however unfairly — their main concern lies in how their girl will look on the beach.'"
Re:I read slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
No joke. Wake me up when it tells me when I'll get hooked up in the first place.
Picky, picky, picky (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what did YOU do for your man this Valentines, ladies?
Give him a present he both needs and loves: FRIGGING DIRECTION.
DON'T go "if you really knew me, you'd know what I want". ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT.
OK?
ffs...
Re:Picky, picky, picky (Score:3, Insightful)
It's 2010. Women are supposed to be equal to men. It's your turn to take your boyfriend out, ladies. You've demanded equality. You got it. Now act like it!
Re:So why the Pre-Christmas Spike? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I read slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake me up when it tells me when I'll get hooked up in the first place.
You will if you really wanted to. But what I noticed with most geeks is that they don't care. They wouldn't mind it, but don't care enough to really go for it.
Re:Picky, picky, picky (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I read slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
your not reading between the lines here.... if you read between the lines it says to do something REALLY romantic for a chick right AFTER V-Day or before spring break... or 2 weeks before X-Mas, and you can steal her away from that Jock asshole..... (a side note, you may consider renewing your health/life insurance as well before you do this)
Before Christmas? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Could that possibly be any more misleading? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's not even that complicated. I'm not sure whether adding in third- and fourth-order effects would increase accuracy or just muddy the waters, so let's take the simplest possible option: our old friends Alice, Bob, and Charlie.
Suppose we start with Alice and Bob, who are presumed to be in a relationship with each other by virtue of frequent affectionate (as defined by keywords/scoring) communications with each other (both public and "private"). (e.g. "Alice u were so hot last nite!" "Luv u BOB"!)
Then, observe a slight dropoff in affectionately-loaded keywords in the communications between Alice and Bob, and a spike in communications between Alice and Charlie. Furthermore, observe that Alice and Charlie's communications patterns have gone from "all/mostly in public, no/few affectionate keywords" to "no/minimal change in public communications, but a spike in 'private' communications".
Furthermore, weight the language and tone in Alice and Charlie's public and private communications separately: If she's saying "'sup charlie" in public, and "OMG so good to see u again missed u so much" in private, the difference between the emotional tone of the Alice/Charlie public conversation and the Alice/Charlie private conversation is yet another big red flag.
Facebook knows damn well when someone's about to get dumped. It's just not telling. (Unless it wants to monetize it by feeding Bob more ads for dating services the week before Valentine's Day, and Alice and Charlie start getting ads for restaurant reservations.)
Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
"Might I suggest that, immediately after Valentine's, some women might be casting men from their sight, appalled that their lovers could think of nothing more romantic than roses from the supermarket and dinner at Outback Steakhouse?"
If your Girl is that shallow.... It was a GOOD THING(tm) that she "dumped you".
Honestly, some guys cant afford more than that on a silly holiday created by a greeting card company. IF she wants Diamonds on Valentines day, Kick that gold digger to the curb pronto!
Re:Valentine's biggest affair discovery day. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So do I... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahhh, misogyny coupled with libertarian delusions of grandeur. A Slashdot perfect storm!
Re:So do I... (Score:4, Insightful)
All men want women to change too.
The foundation of a good relationship is compromise.
Re:So do I... (Score:3, Insightful)
All people want their partners to change. Some are just more self aware than others.
Re:I read slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Girls take too long
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
You can do the roses thing, and get away with it, without appearing cheap or unoriginal. But, while original, alas it also won't be cheap.
Get more than a dozen variegated roses. TWO dozen is a nice, round, number. Expect to pay between $100 and $200. (On the upside, that usually includes a vase.) Send them to her place of work. This is important: she has to have a job. More on that later.
This will have the following effect:
1. All her female coworkers will note, "Hey, there's more than a dozen here!". They will exude thinly veiled jealousy: their SOs never splurged that much. She will feel smug in front of them. (whether she actually wants such things from you is another matter.)
2. The more astute will point out that they are variegated. These are not cheap $11.99/dozen roses.
3. She will realize that you actually had the guts to be so public about your affection. After all, she could utterly dismiss your infantile display. True, but you aren't actually there. It will pass, and if she does and dumps you over it, you have saved the cost of dinner, and future courtship. Note: $150 for the flowers would be cheap by comparison.
4. She will realize that you went to some hardship to spend that kind of money on her. After all, she works for a living too and knows it's hard to earn. Granted, she might dismiss it as wasteful (but, you would probably know that aspect of her personality by now), but hey, it's once a year, and ya gotta live at least a little, no?
O.K. You've made your "investment". Over the next weeks and months, see what the return is. The real measure of a woman is not whether she will "service you" (note: hookers are cheaper than roses, and reciprocal booty calls and NSA relationships don't require them -- they are business arrangements), but rather if she will endure hardship for you.
And, always, always, remember this: if you get dumped over your display, it was a cheap lesson in the long run,
Re:I read slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Be very, very wary about generalising about what women want.
Some women would love to get an ostentatious bouquet of flowers at work. Others would be deeply embarrassed by it.
How to know? That's the tricky bit.
Re:So do I... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I read slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Picky, picky, picky (Score:3, Insightful)
There's actually a very simple reason why women cannot register for the draft that's not sexist at all: population.
This makes no sense on many levels. Women's population is the same as men's... or did you mean something else?
You certainly couldn't mean anything to do with population growth being limited by women's reproductive capacity, as modern nations are so far below that limit you could easily kill half the female population and still have no problem maintaining population growth at current levels.
The number of women available for breeding isn't even close to the limiting factor. Just encourage each surviving woman to have twice as many kids and you're good to go, and the average fecundity would still be far below the human historical norm.
Athough in fact I've heard self-proclaimed "feminists" argue that American women born in the 50's were at a disadvantage (compared to whom, one wonders) as 60,000 men were killed in Vietnam, taking them out of the marriage pool. In a society that practices social monogamy taking men out of the gene pool is just as bad as taking women out.
So your single word "argument" is incoherent and any attempt to make it coherent is obviously wrong.
But do please keep on with your sexist and stupid beliefs, whatever they are!
Re:So do I... (Score:2, Insightful)
Libertarians do not believe in might makes right, everyone else does. That's why they say you need the state to take care of you, because they believe nothing else is possible. Libertarians perfer ownership to rent, and agreement to compromise. You say that makes them bad people, but I prefer an honest asshole to a dishonest good citizen.
Re:I read slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
ahh the "i can get her from the jock asshole if she sees my sensitive side" strategy.
Take it from someone who was "that guy" for the better part of a decade, It's doesn't work.
She's dating the jock asshole because she LIKES jock assholes. That's a point that most introverted shy nerdly types never understand. They don't understand why the girl of their affections would date such a worthless dipshit, so they do their best to be the opposite of that dipshit, never realizing that they're pushing themselves into the friend zone by consciously choosing to be the opposite of what the girl wants.
She knows what you're doing. She's not an idiot (and if she is really that dumb, why do you want her?), and she recognizes your efforts a lot more than you think she does. A lot of girls dig the jock jerks. live with it. some will grow out of it, some wont. if they are going to grow out of it, you can't hurry that up. just wait it out and stop trying so hard.
Re:So do I... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but I prefer an honest good citizen. We don't want "The State" to take care of us. We are the state, and we formed it to keep assholes from getting their way. We take care of each other, because we need to band together to protect ourselves from the powerful who would exploit us. Remember, "anarchy" does not mean "no state." It means "no rulers." "No State" would be written "anocracy."
Libertarians prefer absolute property rights, where each man is the petty tyrant of his tiny domain. They love rent, it's a great source of income.
But, what is really telling in your defense of libertarianism, the point that absolutely and unequivocally proves my point, is where you say, "Libertarians prefer... agreement to compromise."
Normal people reach agreement through compromise.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you actually showed up with them in hand, any woman who got embarrassed "has issues". What's to get embarrassed about?
Well, everyone else in the office is now gossiping about her. That was the whole point of delivering them to work. Does she "have issues" if she doesn't like that?
I guess you could say she does, but they're not the kind of "issues" that would put me off a girl.
Re:I read slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, I was that way too for WAY too long. Then, I started to think like you, and the world started changing for me. I don't chase women anymore. I approach them, and give them a look at who I am, and what I have to offer, and they should be so lucky to hook up with me. I let them know I'm a fun guy, I enjoy life, and if they're good to me, I'll take them along for the ride.
But, I don't supplicate her...I'll happily let them pay for their own way or even buy ME stuff. I get no 'rejection' because, I really don't give a shit if they react or not, there's always another one better looking and a better person just around the corner. You never take things personally. Once you start to think this way, and get over approachment anxiety, it gets much easier in life. Once over that, going for, going out with and enjoying women gets a lot better, and actually becomes fun.
I was an AFC for too long years ago...
Re:So do I... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up. A post from cayenne8 somewhere above extolled the values of "[learning] how [women] think" by listening to the PUA-types. After many years of being frustrated, I tried this approach. I read "The Game", started dressing a certain way, used the tips from the book and all in all tried to "alpha" myself up. To a certain extent it worked. I was actually able to talk to girls at bars and parties and get them to laugh at my jokes and succeed at getting some numbers and some casual making out only an hour or two after meeting them, but I noticed that as soon as I let the "character" I was playing slip, they would quickly become uninterested. At first this frustrated me a lot, but then I realized that this was perfectly natural since what I was doing was deceiving them. The way I was acting and presenting myself wasn't me trying to put my best foot forward (which we all do and is actually a good thing), it was me trying to convince these women that I was a completely different kind of guy. Fast forward a few months to a blind date I went on. I try my usual spiel and it seems to hold her attention, but she doesn't seem very sure of me. Then the facade slips, but this time the girl actually likes me better when I'm just being my usual, nerdy self. Fast forward to now and I have a loving, year-long relationship that isn't going anywhere because it's based on the fact that we actually, you know, like each other and have shared interests rather than her liking some persona I'm trying to adopt.
BenEnglishAtHome's story about his friend's wife might well be a similar phenomena. Just like I was pretending to be a boisterous, loud, type a, alpha male, his friend's wife could have been pretending to have a much bigger sexual appetite than she really did because she thought that all women needed to do that to attract men and when the facade came off, no one was happy. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's a good idea to dress nicely, be interesting and generally try to be the most attractive person you can be, but that trying to play psychological tricks on women (which is, after all, what the PUAs are pretty much advocating) might work for shot term liaisons, but it will never be the foundation of a good relationship and you may find out that she's putting on just as much of a show as you are.
Re:I read slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
She knows what you're doing. She's not an idiot (and if she is really that dumb, why do you want her?).
I was totally with you until then. Clearly they want her because she is hot. Duh. Her intelligence probably has nothing to do with it. This was a concept I wrestled with as a teenager. I operated under the assumption that anything I wanted so badly had to be worthy of that desire. Therefore, I projected the illusion of intelligence onto beautiful girls, and ended up surprised time and again when they would date the most idiotic jerks they could find, and generally competed with one another to make the stupidest possible decisions. Lesson I learned is that those girls are just as bad as the guys they date, only I was as blind to their faults as they were to those guys' faults.
Re:I read slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Girls don't want to fuck nice, sensitive, shy guys, they want to be friends with them.
And (speaking as one of those guys), we want to be friends with them, too. In fact, we might almost begin to think that we could actually stand to live with them for some extended length of time. Crazy, I know.
It’s just that we can’t quite grasp the (to us, at least) mind-bogglingly stupid idea that you shouldn’t get into a relationship with someone who’s your friend. That should be the first component of a relationship!
Who do they want to marry? A stranger? An asshole? Someone they can’t stand? Their enemy? Do they want their marriage to consist of sleeping in separate beds, having a few affairs, and getting divorced? That’s what they’re setting themselves up for.
And we wonder why the divorce rate is so high...