As kind-of-Canadian Alexander Graham Bell once said, “When one door closes, another one opens…” While he wasn’t quite right about doors (hey, he was a phone guy), he might have been on to something when it comes to relationships.
Just about anyone who uses social media knows that just about everyone who uses social media just got engaged over the holidays. Facebook can corroborate the anecdotes; according to their numbers, 30% of people who got engaged in 2015 did so in November or December, with the three most popular days being Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Eve.
Then, between January 3 and January 4, the rest of the people either joined an online dating site or filed for divorce. Ok, maybe not all the rest of the people, but a lot of them.
January 3 has now come to be known as “Dating Sunday”, the most active day, across all platforms, for online singles. Specifically, the most active time is 8:52pm on the Sunday following the turn of the New Year. In other words, the commercial window right before the Season 6 premier of Downton Abbey.
Sites like Plenty of Fish expected over 80,000 new users to sign up on that day alone, with others projecting new users bumps upwards of 30%. Match.com saw almost 90,000 messages exchanged between Canadian users alone on this day last year.
Then, hopefully unrelated to Dating Sunday, the Monday following the turn of the New Year – January 4 in 2016 – has been dubbed, “Divorce Monday”. Law firms say they experience up to double the usual amount of inbound requests on this day and a survey out of the UK suggests that when all is said and done with January, this month represents a 25% spike in splits compared to the other eleven.
So what does this all mean?
Well, it could mean that all that lovey dovey stuff on Instagram lights a spark under our asses and reminds us that success requires effort. It could mean that people are much too influenced by observed holidays and fanfare rather than rational judgment and personal relevance. Or it could also mean that trees makes us horny. Or angry. Or both.
What it definitely means though, is that for a lot of people, January isn’t just the start of a new year; it really is the start of a new chapter in life. And judging by the numbers, that chapter could have a lot of sex in it.
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