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

From “I love you babe” to “leave me alone” Romantic Relationship Breakups on Twitter Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella1 , Ingmar Weber2 , and Sonya Dal Cin3 1 Aalto University, kiran.garimella@aalto.fi 2 Qatar Computing Research Institute, iweber@qf.org.qa 3... More

From “I love you babe” to “leave me alone” Romantic Relationship Breakups on Twitter Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella1 , Ingmar Weber2 , and Sonya Dal Cin3 1 Aalto University, kiran.garimella@aalto.fi 2 Qatar Computing Research Institute, iweber@qf.org.qa 3 University of Michigan, sdalcin@umich.edu 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- Less