So you enjoyed a nice, romantic weekend away with your special person. You meet up with some friends on the Tuesday for a cheeky midweek toot and tell them about it. That’s scenario A.

Scenario B is slightly different but it also begins with a weekend away. Alas there is no need to meet up with friends and tell them about it, you’ve already posted a 146-picture album that chronicles every moment. The bathroom, the bed, the complimentary bottle of wine – we’ve seen it all, the only thing you didn’t share with us was the late night hanky panky.

Here’s the good news fans of sharing the love on Facebook – a recent study has shown that those who are ‘loud and proud’ about their significant others on social media are more likely to stay with their partners. Bloomberg is going to break that study down for us:

The students in the study, who were all in couples, first answered questions about their age, sex, length of relationship, and level of commitment. Then they logged into their Facebook profiles and allowed researchers to record the number of photos they had posted with their partners, whether they had indicated that they were “in a relationship,” how many times each person in the couple wrote on the other’s wall in the last month, and the number of mutual friends they shared. Six months later, researchers asked the students by e-mail whether they were still in that relationship.

After controlling for age, sex, and relationship length, the study found that people who said they were “in a relationship” and posted a lot of photos with their partners were more likely to be deeply committed and still together.

You could argue that they are probably too embarrassed to break up after bombarding everyone about how their partner is, like, literally the greatest human to ever walk this earth but that’s just the cynical bastard in me. This below from the co-authors of the study:

“These publicly posted cues likely induced participants to perceive themselves as part of a romantic unit, thus cementing the relationship,” wrote Catalina Toma and Mina Choi…Their theory is that publicly confirming romance in and of itself deepens that romance, partly because people want to live in a way that’s consistent with how they represent themselves to the outside world. Having a lot of mutual friends was not associated with staying in a couple past six months, nor was how often a person’s partner posted on their wall.

Does this mean we will stop judging your constant overshares and proclamations of eternal love? Of course it doesn’t, and of course we hope that you guys stay together forever.

Just make us a promise that if it does go tits up you’ll throw some mud around on social media, it’s the least you could do after all those years of lovey-dovey.

[source:bloomberg]