Let’s get the good news out of the way first: apparently, 3 million first dates happen every day. That’s 3 million chances of turning a casual encounter into something more meaningful. Three million chances for sparks to fly. Three million chances to discover the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with! Of course, it’s also 3 million chances to find the latest incompatible person in your life while continuing the slow trudge toward becoming one of the 5.4% of Americans who die having never married.





Much more common than a first dating eventually culminating in marriage is the chance of it going nowhere. And while love does spring eternal, so does love’s nemesis: the nearly inevitable break-up. Information designers David McCandless and Lee Byron have found a clever way to package some of the alternately terrifying and heartening statistics about breaking up–by putting them into handy infographics. Now, it’s easier than ever to see how your relationship will probably end.





Using data culled from the US Census, Facebook polls, Twitter, and the annual Durex global sex survey, McCandless and Byron made three graphics detailing some telling break-up figures. These matrices explore everything from the most popular reasons people break-up to their methods for doing so, and even the most popular times of year. (It turns out that surviving December 1st is something of a triumph.)

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Most people reading these and seeing some correlation with their own relationships might be reinvigorated with purpose, and try to change the course they’re heading on. Others, however, might simply look at this information as a helpful guide on how to initiate a breakup. Good luck out there, everybody.

H/t to Visual News