Why Dating a Twitter User is Asking for Heartache

Posted 04/21/2011 at 5:38am | by Paul Lilly

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Listen up all you single ladies and gents, if you're looking for a long-term relationship, don't date an active Twitter user. Turns out that relationships might be taking a backseat to microblogging, at least according to data by Match.com's OKCupid portal, which suggests that Twitter users make for flighty boyfriends or girlfriends and bail on their mates faster than non-Twitter users (or maybe it's the other way around).

"Frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else, probably via some bit.ly hack," OKCupid says. "Unfortunately, we have no way to tell who's dumping who here; whether the twitterati are more annoying or just more flighty than everyone else."

The difference in the length of relationships isn't always significant. Broken down by age, OKCupid found that out of 833,987 subjects, the average relationship for an 18-year-old is about 9 months, compared to about 9 and a half months for a non-Twitter user. The gap widens a little as the age goes up, but never more than about a month.

This was just one of 10 charts about sex, the others covering a wide range of topics, some of which are NSFW (due to bolded titles, not graphic pictures). You can check it out here.