By Spy Espiritu
So you’ve arranged a fancy Valentine’s Day dinner, booked a nice hotel overlooking Manila Bay, bought the naughtiest lingerie your exclusive Catholic girls’ school upbringing could tolerate, and went through the torture of getting waxed the hell out of your balbon hair, only to be dumped the night of Valentine’s Day—and by SMS, to wit! Poor unlucky you, right? How could he be this cruel at this most romantic of times? Well, the not-so-funny news is you’re not alone.
Data from several key sources indicate that, contrary to the popular belief that it’s only love in the air during special occasions, break-ups happen to spike around milestone holidays—starting from Christmas and New Year’s all the way to Valentine’s Day, with at least one source claiming the peak happens around March.
British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled a chart using Facebook status updates to show which times of the year FB users break up. He did this by measuring "the frequency of the words 'breakup' or 'broken up' out of all Facebook status updates on each day," and showed off the graphic at a TED conference in July 2010 in Oxford, England.
McCandless also found that the highest number of break-ups happen at the start of the work-week: Monday. So would it help that Feb. 14, 2020 falls on a Friday? Don’t count on it.
The New York Daily News reports a flurry of business for divorce lawyers right after Valentine’s Day, an observation backed up by research commissioned by the international dating website AnastasiaDate. The possible reason? Both sources speculate that individuals may have set Valentine’s Day as a final ultimatum for their partners to fulfill their expectations regarding the holiday, and pull the trigger afterwards if Valentine’s Day comes around and those expectations are still unmet.
Talk about D-day following V-Day.
It’s a complicated world, made more complicated by the increasing popularity of newer and newer ways of meeting people online and offline, adding more and more pressure in our intimate relationships. Now it seems, even Valentine holidays can’t protect our hearts from breaking.