A mumbled ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ no longer has to be the first sign that a relationship is over.
Researchers have discovered that it is possible to identify when a romance is doomed months before one of the parties realizes it – through almost imperceptible shifts in their vocabulary.
“It seems that even before people are aware that a breakup is going to take place, it has an impact on their lives,” said Sarah Seraj of the University of Texas at Austin, who led the study.
“Even if they don’t talk about their relationship, their language style changes.”
Seraj and her colleagues used a computer to analyze more than one million posts written by nearly 7,000 users of Reddit, the social media forum. They looked at messages