From "I love you babe" to "leave me alone" - Romantic Relationship Breakups on Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter data from 661 couples to uncover psychological patterns and behaviors associated with romantic breakups, revealing new phenomena like sudden follower drops post-breakup.

Contribution

It demonstrates how public Twitter data can be used to study psychological processes and uncovers a new pattern of follower loss during breakups.

Findings

Pre-relationship closeness predicts post-relationship closeness.

Stonewalling indicates impending breakup.

Users experience 15-20 follower drops after breaking up.

Abstract

We use public data from Twitter to study the breakups of the romantic relationships of 661 couples. Couples are identified through profile references such as @user1 writing "@user2 is the best boyfriend ever!!". Using this data set we find evidence for a number of existing hypotheses describing psychological processes including (i) pre-relationship closeness being indicative of post-relationship closeness, (ii) "stonewalling", i.e., ignoring messages by a partner, being indicative of a pending breakup, and (iii) post-breakup depression. We also observe a previously undocumented phenomenon of "batch un-friending and being un-friended" where users who break up experience sudden drops of 15-20 followers and friends. Our work shows that public Twitter data can be used to gain new insights into psychological processes surrounding relationship dissolutions, something that most people go through at least once in their lifetime.