I'm behind on my holidays

Looks like I am a little behind on writing obligatory “holiday” posts.  I missed my annual Valentine’s Day post and I didn’t have anything amazing to share about Presidents’ day. I’ll probably forget to write a post to my dad on his birthday Thursday (Hi Daddy, Happy Birthday! I love you) and I already missed a lot of other birthdays this month too (like those of Jill and Andria).

But I guess it’s not really too late to write my Valentine’s Day post (I assure you, I will actually never get around to the President’s day post). Especially because Facebook came out with some hilarious Valentine’s Day research that says people who are in a relationship or married are happier than everyone else.

I know what you are thinking, how did Facebook possibly come up with this?

The methodology:

1. Happiness= how many positive words a person uses in their status updates

2. They looked at status updates from English speakers for one week in January

3. They measured the number of positive words used in status updates for both people in and not in Facebook relationships

What Facebook found (you can see all of the research here):

- People who are in relationships/married seem happier

- People in open relationships are not happy, in fact they are less happy than people who are widowed or in a complicated relationship

- Men are less happy in open relationships than women

- People who don’t list their relationship status are 50 percent more negative than everyone else

Things I think Facebook forgot to explain:

- The activity rate of users- For example, are the people who don’t list their relationship statuses not active users of Facebook?

- What words are positive and what words are negative? Did a human scan status updates and measure their sentiment?

- What about people who are in “fake” marriages, such as girls who are friends? (Thanks Elissa for this one!)

- What about people who are in relationships but don’t have them listed on Facebook?

I’m not sure I totally agree with all of this research, but I think it could have the potential to be true. What do you think, are people in relationships happier?

Oh yea, and Happy Valentine’s Day!