Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock
Topics: News, Reddit, Sex and Relationships, US News, World News, Community
Kit Roberts
Topics: News, Reddit, Sex and Relationships, US News, World News, Community
A man examined how the texts in his five-year relationship changed over time in a bid to understand what went wrong.
Relationships can be one of the most important events in our lives, and going through a breakup of a longterm relationship is a hugely difficult thing.
The individual took to Reddit to share analysis of the words that were used in the messages throughout the relationship.
He used this to create a word cloud of the messages, including texts, social media DMs, all the most popular channels, with the most common words being bigger.
Advert
In this day and age, daily messages and texts are a staple of how couples communicate, whether it's a quick 'I love you', reminding someone to pick up milk, or other more private exchanges.
The poster who posted to the DataisBeautiful thread realized that this was a wealth of interesting information, which might help him understand more about how the relationship ended up breaking down after five years together.
Most importantly, he wondered if it would show when the cracks started to form.
So, what did he find? Let's break it down year by year.
In the first picture, called 'Year 1: We Met online', the words that stood out most appear fairly casual, with things like 'haha', 'food', 'weekend', and 'yeah' being most common.
Perhaps that indicates the earlier dating stages.
This was titled 'We moved in together', with the words 'haha' and 'good' again featuring heavily, suggesting things are going well.
But there were also words like 'baby' and 'morning', reflecting how they were growing closer, as well as the mundane with 'work'.
In the third picture, titled 'bliss', things seem to be settling into a loving relationship.
Words such as 'love' featured heavily, as well as 'lunch' and 'pizza', which are nearly always good. There was also 'Amazon' as well - because, well, you know.
In their fourth year, things seemed to be going well, as they had gotten engaged.
By this time, pet names like 'bub' featured, as well as 'amazing', and, of course, 'dinner', suggesting the cliche that couples talk about what to eat a lot is true.
There was also 'movie', suggesting how they were spending time together.
The fifth image was entitled ‘Year 5: She demanded a third move, then she kicked me out'.
It's not clear exactly what the datails surrounding this are, but the words seem to take a slightly cooler tone in this year.
Words such as 'okay' and 'good' seem similar, but could be in a very different context, as well as the subtle, but telling, 'hopefully'.
There was another word cloud for after they split up, called 'Year 6: We tried to resolve things, then catastrophe struck'.
By this time, the tone of the words was much more serious, and certainly not the warm feeling suggested by earlier ones.
Frequent words included 'want', 'know', 'just', 'sure', 'yeah', 'think', and 'okay', as well as 'sorry'.
In the final image, the user compiled the most used words over the course of the relationship.
The biggest hits included: ‘okay', 'haha', 'good', and 'baby'.
Many people were touched by the images, and others pointed out that, while couples communicate a lot via text, this won't be reflective of the entire communications.
One said: "Texting is either random I love you throughout the day or can you get this while you are out with ya, or ok as a response."