[aasarava]

Seems flawed. If all that McCandless did was scrape status updates for "break up" and "broken up", he may well have included events referring to bands or other groups breaking up. It would have been better to look at changes in Facebook's relationship status.

Also, I'm not so sure it makes sense to assume, as the author of the article does, that breakups before Christmas have to do with money. If the data is even valid, then it's quite likely that breakups occur before Christmas because people don't want to go through the charade of spending Christmas together and possibly with each others' families if the relationship isn't going anywhere.