Facebook knows how long your relationship is going to last

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Facebook let us in on something creepy. With the mountains of data it has on its members, Facebook has a pretty good idea if a romantic relationship between two people on the social network will last. It turns out that if two people have been “Facebook official” for three or more months, they’re likely in it for the long haul.

The Facebook Data Science team has been busy digging into the network’s statistics in honor of Valentine’s Day, serving up an interesting look at the average user’s love life. One of the biggest takeaways from the study, which used anonymized, aggregated data, is the length of our relationships: the longer you’ve been together, the less likely you are to break up. “About half of all Facebook relationships that have survived three months are likely to survive to four years or longer,” summarizes Bogdan State of the Facebook Data Science team. Breaking up is most popular during May, June and July, while there was an acceleration of relationships coming to an end during 2011.