Facebook has a lot of dirt on us. It has those first, cringe-worthy, over-sharing statuses we wrote. It has evidence of exes, outfits and nights out we’d love to have erased from the Internet – and our memory – for good. Now it has another piece of intelligence on us – our relationship status . Not because you’ve declared yourself in one, or single – or even in the ambiguous hinterland of ‘it’s complicated’. No, there’s another way of finding out this information and we’re handing it right over without, perhaps, even being aware we are. It’s all to do with how often you post. Specifically, if you post around twice a day, you’re effectively saying you’re single, irrespective of what your personal information states. These posts tend to taper off when you’re in a relationship. Here’s how they found this out. In their study on love, Facebook explained, “We studied the group of people who changed their status from ‘Single’ to ‘In a relationship’ and also stated an anniversary date as the start of their relationship.” Facebook described this as ‘day 0’. In the 100 days leading up to this day, they noticed an increasing frequency of updates from users. Couples, up until the day they officially became ‘an item’ would share more stuff between themselves. Eventually, these peak then go down again. “Presumably,” Facebook says, “couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world.” It’s also what people are saying that gives the game away. The posts tend to change in terms of tone and what’s being said. “The content of the interactions gets sweeter and more positive. We used statistical methods to automatically analyze a set of aggregated, anonymised timeline interactions. “For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing positive emotions minus the proportion of words expressing negative ones.” So there you go, that coy “It’s complicated” is fooling no one.