By Amanda Chatel — Written on Feb 13, 2015
With Valentine's Day literally just hours away ― yeah! ― love is indeed in the air. I mean, just look at your TV ―every other commercial is trying to convince your boyfriend why he should go to Jared to buy you some fancy jewels, and Hallmark has been all up in everyone's grill for a month now in preparation of their favorite holiday. Ah, love!
Since we are living in the digital age and the way we express our love is usually done via all the digital gadgets and social media platforms we have at our disposal, in honor of Valentine's Day, Twitter has put together some pretty remarkable stats in regards to their users and the topic of love. Just this morning Twitter released an interactive map of "United States of Love." I have to admit, it's pretty charming.
Since its creation in 2006 Twitter has been keeping tabs on exactly what is being tweeted how, where, and when. What they found is that the words "love" and "loved" are tweeted pretty often, so they broke it down by state and by tweets per million to see where all the amour is being tweeted. The most loving state? Kentucky, with 64,938 tweets per million featuring with the word "love" or "loved." Not far behind are Tennessee, Nebraska, and North Dakota at 62,267, 62,004, and 61,297 tweets per million, respectively.
But because if there's a list of who's tweeting words of love the most, of course that means someone has to be last in line. The part of the country not really in the mood for love would be the District of Columbia at only 35, 073 tweets per million (politicians, man!), and as for actual states, Louisiana is the one that needs to be pierced with Cupid’s arrow this Valentine's Day.
In their research, Twitter also noticed a sort of "Lifecycle of Love" in regards to how often hashtags are used, which looks like this:
January: #onlinedating
March: #breakup/#justbrokeup and #engaged
June: #firstdate
July: #justmarried
August: #friendzone
September: #divorce/#divorcing
Although I'm not really sure why anyone would announce their divorce on Twitter, let alone hashtag it, I guess it takes all kinds of people to make the world go round.
What we can take from this, if I were to do a quick summary is: If you want to be loved then move to Kentucky, politicians have no love to give, and if you're online dating in January, perhaps you'll be divorcing by September. Yes, I think that's it. But no matter where you live or what hashtags you prefer to use, tell the people you love that you love them this Valentine's Day. That's what Hallmark would want.
