The key to understanding romantic relationships is an age-old mystery.

But the elusive language of love may be easier to decipher with new Georgia Institute of Technology computing research that brings insight into how we find, talk about, and improve our relationships with that significant other.

The research on romance comes from three separate studies by the College of Computing and shows a snapshot of what love in the digital age looks like, including the current state of online dating and how partners communicate using technology. The research findings allow for a deeper look at how technology impacts and supports building relationships and takes us behind closed digital doors for a glimpse at the many ways couples connect.

How a wedding engagement changes Twitter feeds

Study examines what happens to online personas in the months after she says yes

Twitter was used as a lens to look into the lives of nearly 1,000 people who used the site to announce their wedding engagement. By comparing tweets before and after, the study was able to determine how people changed their online personas following the proposal.

Some differences were split along gender lines. Others identified how people alter the words they use on Twitter after they are engaged.

The study followed 923 people who used “#engaged” to announce in 2011. The research team then looked at each person’s tweets in the nine-month period before the engagement and 12 months afterward (2 million total tweets). They were also compared to a random sampling of tweeters during the same time frame (12 million tweets).

After people got engaged, tweets with the word “I” or “me” dropped by 69 percent. They were replaced with “we” and “us.” There was barely any change within the control group. Similarly, tweets using familial words such as “future-in-laws” and “children” jumped by 219 percent after the proposal.

“People began to paint themselves as a couple, rather than as individuals,” said Munmun de Choudhury, a Georgia Tech associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing who led the study. “They’re going through a major change in life, and it shows on social media as they adapt to society’s expectations of their marital identity.”

The most frequent terms used by females when tweeting about their significant other were tied to emotion (for example, they “love” their “wonderful” fiancé). Men are more likely to use physical descriptors such as sexy, beautiful, or gorgeous when talking about their fiancée.

De Choudhury and co-author Michael Massimi also noticed that engaged people are much more likely to think and tweet about the future. Instead of using past-tense verbs, future-tense verbs surged by 62 percent after engagement.

“Twitter can be a powerful tool that can mirror our thoughts and how we’re actually feeling,” said de Choudhury. “This isn’t based on what they told us they did. It’s a reliable record – it’s what they actually did.”