Robin Weis, the same girl who brought us 8 years of dating data, tracked her crying patterns for 589 days, rating them on a scale from ‘a tear or two’ to ‘I am a crumpled pile of flesh’. She cried on 216 of those days. And I thought I cried a lot.

 Number of Cries Per Day

She categorized each cry into 8 general categories, shown in the graph below. The mound of purple life-related cries on the left side was largely during a 10 week trip to Europe. A large proportion of her cries were breakup and relationship related, which included finding out her boyfriend was married. Yep, that’s bound to cause some tears. Check out her full post here.

Categories of Cries Over Time

What I’ve found interesting

• Relationships and breakups appear to cause a lot of negative emotions. It’d be interesting to see what a graph of positive emotions due to relationships would look like, though that would be harder to quantify. Crying generally has an obvious beginning and end, but how would you track your start of happy feelings and end of happy feelings as precisely?

• Is travel-crying a thing? Robin mentions that almost 20% of her crying occurred while she was traveling solo. I had a similar experience recently when I was in South America. It can be particularly uncomfortable if you’re staying in a hostel and there’s nowhere private where you can just go and cry. Has anyone else experienced this?

As I’m taking my first steps into the world of online dating (I just signed up to OKCupid for the first time) it can be a little scary seeing the amount of angst relationships can cause. Might I be more comfortable staying safely single?

I hate to be yet another blog that touts the benefits of travel, but my experience with travel is relevant here. Even though I spent a lot of time being unhappy while traveling, overall it was a rewarding experience that enhanced my life and I’d do it again. As for dating, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.