Break-ups step up after Valentine's day, Christmas?

Days following Valentine's day and two weeks before Christmas are the peak times in a year when people break up, according to an analysis of data on social networking site Facebook.

Days following Valentine's day and two weeks before Christmas are the peak times in a year when people break up, according to an analysis of data on social networking site Facebook.

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British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specialises in showcasing data in visual ways, has compiled a chart that shows what time of the year people split up the most.

McCandless and his colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases "breakup" and "broken up."

They found two big spikes on the calendar for breakups. The first was after Valentine's Day and the other big "romantically treacherous time" is about two weeks before Christmas.

A third period when people are most likely to split up is before spring break since "spring fever makes people restless, or maybe college students just don't want to be tied down when they're partying in Cancun."

Mondays are the most likely day to break up, while summer and fall are the safest seasons, an NBC report said.

McCandless's analysis also said that there are fewest splits on Christmas Day, but there's a peak just before Christmas. The number of breakups starts steadily increasing at the beginning of November and reaches its peak in the two weeks before Christmas. The holiday breakup rate plummets somewhere around December 23.

August is the month with the lowest number of breakups, according to the data.