These two brutal breaks seem to have nothing in common, and yet both users’ Reddit posts pointed to a breakup months in advance.
Researchers took posts from more than 6,800 users who posted in the r / BreakUps subreddit and ran them through a word processing program to analyze their language patterns from the year before to the year after their breakup. (r / BreakUps is an online forum on the social news platform Reddit, where more than 143,000 members post their broken-up stories.)
The moment a user broke up, there was a spike in the average use of self-centered words like “I” and “I”, which are personal pronouns, said lead study author Sarah Seraj, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin.
The increase in self-directed words was observable three months before the breakup and did not return to normal language patterns – as measured by the poster’s average patterns four to 12 months before the breakup – until six months after the end of the relationship .
There was also a sharp drop in a poster’s analytic thinking, which is a standardized measure of the formality of a person’s writing, Seraj said. The decline, which points to an increase in personal storytelling and casual writing, happened because people were writing about highly personal topics, she said.
Non-truncated messages showed similar patterns
Researchers analyzed a user’s posts in r / BreakUps as well as their posts in other Reddit forums called subreddits. Self-directed words increased and analytical thinking declined around the time of the breakup, regardless of whether their messages were about their failed relationship, the researchers found.
“The effects of the breakup translate to other aspects of their lives, even if they don’t talk about it directly,” Seraj said.
At the time of the breakup, there was a spike in the user’s cognitive processing words like “think” and “should,” which are used when someone is trying to solve a problem, Seraj said.
There was also a spike in a user’s collective thinking – noticed through the use of the word “we” – at the time of the breakup, but it returned to normal levels within a few months.
“They can’t really separate their partner’s identity from their own, so they use more ‘we’ words because they talk about their shared life with their partner,” Seraj said.
Long-term posters take longer to return to normal
Users posting five or more days in r / BreakUps took much longer for their language pattern to return to normal compared to those posting less than five days. While short-term users’ analytical thinking returned to normal two months after the breakup, it took six months of use, according to the study.
The study did not analyze why long-term users lasted longer, but Seraj hypothesized that their breakups could have been messy so they needed more support, or that the user kept thinking about the relationship, preventing them from moving forward.
For those who are still struggling six months after a fracture, Seraj recommended talking to a therapist or seeking other professional help.
Reddit provides authenticity
It has been difficult in the past to analyze the psychology of breakup because it is a personal thing, and “it is not that we can go to people’s homes and sneak up on them and see how they are doing in their personal lives. , ”said Seraj.
With social media, people are posting about their daily life at the moment. People leave traces of their emotional and psychological state in their online language, she said, and it’s available for researchers to look at.
Reddit users are also anonymous, which Seraj says allows them to be more authentic online and share personal accounts of their breakup without fear of it coming back to the real world.
Warning signs
This study proves that people spend a lot of time thinking about a breakup, said Gary Lewandowski Jr., a professor of psychology at Monmouth University in New Jersey, who was not involved in the study.
The results also showed that “there are signs that you have already started disconnecting from your partner weeks before you end the relationship,” Lewandowski said.
If you find yourself using more self-centered words like “ me, me and mine ” in relation to a relationship decision, it could be a sign that you’ve already made up your mind, he said.
Talking badly about your partner, both on social media and in real life, is another red flag for a relationship, according to Lewandowski.
In a good relationship, a lot of who you are is woven into your partner, he said. If you were to speak badly about your partner, you are essentially speaking badly about yourself.”
A path forward
For long term breakup posters, Lewandowski recommended that they write about the positive aspects of their relationship so they can shift their focus to the relationship as a whole.
While most people mourn the end of a relationship, he stresses that not all breakups are bad.
“If that relationship didn’t help us become a better person, it can be,” Lewandowski said.