Dumped? Chemistry, Dating, and Break-ups

David McCan­d­less has com­piled 10,000 relationship-status updates on Face­book to deter­mine the peak times of year when break-ups occur — and it involves chem­istry, dat­ing expec­ta­tions, and other fac­tors. Since roughly 70 per­cent of divorces are ini­ti­ated by wives — and the same sta­tis­tic is seem­ingly true for rela­tion­ship break-ups based on anec­do­tal data — the data is use­ful in under­stand­ing when and why young women gen­er­ally break-up with their part­ners. (Fur­ther data from a Har­vard Uni­ver­sity study on women ini­ti­at­ing break-ups is in this book.)

As Roissy, Geekosys­tem, and Math­ias Mikkelsen have observed:

• Break-ups sky­rocket right before Spring Break
• Most rela­tion­ship end­ings are announced (pub­licly) on Mondays
• The sum­mer usu­ally starts with peo­ple being single
• Break-ups rise again before Christ­mas, but the low­est day of the year is Christ­mas Day

Still, a few caveats need to be made. The sam­ple size is 10,000 of the mil­lions who use Face­book. I do not know whether this is a statistically-significant sam­ple, but McCan­d­less seems to know enough about data analy­sis to know what he is doing. And, as Roissy notes, the data is likely only rel­e­vant towards col­lege stu­dents and early twenty-somethings:

Obvi­ously, this graph is skewed toward the rela­tion­ship dynam­ics of col­lege stu­dents, what with Face­book being pri­mar­ily the domain of that demo­graphic and college-aged exhi­bi­tion­ists the least likely to exer­cise [online] dis­cre­tion about their per­sonal lives.

Since female stu­dents grow up to become young women, they will likely carry their (harm­ful) col­lege dating-attitudes to the rest of their twen­ties as well (because they had likely never learned any bet­ter). As a result, any behav­ioral analy­sis of college-aged women will likely indi­cate what the future dating-world has in store — bar­ring any mir­a­cles, of course.

The first obser­va­tion is that break-ups gen­er­ally occur just before any extended length of time that a woman will be apart from her boyfriend. How­ever, this asser­tion is not entirely accu­rate. The three times dur­ing which a cou­ple will be apart for a sig­nif­i­cant period are win­ter break, spring break, and sum­mer vaca­tion — and the chart shows increases before these times. Sum­mer vaca­tion is the period when a cou­ple will be apart for the longest amount of time, but it is also the period that shows small­est rise in break-ups. Another fac­tor must be com­ing into play.

Take Spring Break (dur­ing one of which at Boston Uni­ver­sity I drove from Boston to Miami with friends and wit­nessed the debauch­ery). Every­one knows what hap­pens over this Dionysian time — after which the BU infir­mary report­edly had a sky­rock­et­ing num­ber of patients — so I do not need to go into detail.

From Valentine’s Day (when boyfriends are sup­posed to prove their value) to Spring Break, the num­ber of break-ups jump dra­mat­i­cally. Women, dur­ing this time, are mak­ing deci­sions between short-term plea­sure ver­sus long-term hap­pi­ness (see dat­ing and oppor­tu­nity cost) — should they stick it out with their boyfriends, or dump them for a few weeks of, shall we say, “fun”? It is impos­si­ble to under­state the degree to which young women are gov­erned by their emotions.

For girls, vaca­tions are the ulti­mate aphro­disiac because they have the (tem­po­rary) oppor­tu­nity to live lux­u­ri­ous lives of their dreams (hence the cult-following of “Sex and the City”) with beaches and room ser­vice while hav­ing access to “exotic” men. When I lived in Lon­don on a study-abroad pro­gram in the sum­mer of 2001, I stud­ied British jour­nal­ism, wrote for a mag­a­zine, and worked as a bar­tender. All of the guys on the pro­gram were ignored by the girls, who wanted only to have “fun” with British men.

When I vis­ited Israel on a Birthright Israel trip in 2006, all of the guys were also ignored by the girls in favor of the mus­cled, machine-gun car­ry­ing, Israeli sol­diers who accom­pa­nied us. (Per­haps they were jeal­ous of the Israeli girls who got to date them?) In Lon­don and Israel, many of girls who became involved with the locals had boyfriends back home. For these rea­sons, it is a bad sign when a girl­friend wants to go on a trip with her friends and with­out her boyfriend.

As far as Spring Break, I can only won­der how many of the women return to cam­pus later after the emo­tional highs wear-off and then regret the choice to dump (or cheat on) their boyfriends. I would also cau­tion col­lege girls: Men will not marry women with his­tory of promis­cu­ous dat­ing and hooking-up — and if you act in this man­ner while you are in col­lege and later, your dat­ing market-value will decline later.

A sim­i­lar increase in break-ups occurs between Hal­loween and the mid­dle of Decem­ber, but it is for a slightly-different rea­son. Women gen­er­ally want to date “up” — and that usu­ally refers to girls want­ing men (in what­ever peer group in which they asso­ciate) who have high sta­tus among other males and are also wanted by other women. Girls have moti­va­tions rooted in both biol­ogy and evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy to be picky.

When a woman is in col­lege, this will refer to men who are pop­u­lar ath­letes or fra­ter­nity mem­bers, throw the biggest par­ties, and have the most fun. At work, it will refer to a vice pres­i­dent or the CEO. At a reli­gious school here in Jerusalem, it will refer to the stu­dent who knows the most Torah and Tal­mud and will likely become a rabbi. The con­text changes, but the dat­ing “strat­egy” remains the same.

How­ever, as the West­ern holiday-season approaches, young girls real­ize that the guys they want are rarely those whom their fam­i­lies would like. (After all, most par­ents from older gen­er­a­tions know from mar­riage quotes and mar­riage his­tory that good dating-choices involve both the brain and the heart — despite the fact that few fam­i­lies today have seem­ingly both­ered to teach young peo­ple what they have learned.) So, women are choos­ing to dump their boyfriends rather then take them home — or to go to the homes of their sig­nif­i­cant others.

And since few young girls today are dat­ing for mar­riage — as would be pru­dent — and instead focus­ing on hav­ing “fun,” they return to their sex­ual escapades after the hol­i­day sea­son is over and the new semes­ter begins. At least until Spring Break. It is all an exam­ple of mod­ern dat­ing in the Stone Age.

Ear­lier: “Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay“