3.5 Years of a Relationship, in Whatsapp Messages
Analysing data from a Whatsapp chat with my girlfriend
Valentine’s Day 2020 has recently passed. The day of the year where couples celebrate their relationship and social media is awash with posts, pictures and praises for ‘other half’s. It is often an unenjoyable time of year for anyone not in a relationship, who has to deal with the portrayals of perfection we so frequently see on our timelines. Despite being in a relationship, I too am fed up with seeing unrealistic depictions of couples online so this year I decided to fight back with some cold hard data. To do this I sacrificed my privacy and turned to the medium which I believe to be the most real - my Whatsapp chat with my girlfriend.
I recently discovered that it is possible to download your entire chat history from Whatsapp into a single text file. It occurred to me that this could be a very interesting source of data which might give a far more realistic, unique portrayal of what a relationship is actually like. So here in this article I’ll put mine out there in the open in the hope that you might find the analysis interesting, or that it might inspire you to a) think about how data can counteract the false reality we see on social media, b) dig a bit deeper into the data you yourself produce or c) give your partner a very nerdy, data science-themed Valentine’s day gift.
(Bonus points if you can identify all the section headings…)
