No founder, organization, proclamation, or establishing act is documented for National Breakup Day. Its February 21 placement is best explained as the closing day of an informal, humor-driven social-media sequence called Anti-Valentine's Week, rather than a deliberately chosen, documented date.
CHAPTER 01
Where the famous chart came from
That subject got its best-known image by accident. In 2008, the British journalist and data designer David McCandless wanted an illustration for a book and, with the designer Lee Byron, searched Facebook status updates for the phrases "break up" and "broken up." They plotted the results across the year and titled the picture "Peak Break-Up Times."
It ran in his book The Visual Miscellaneum and spread far beyond it after a 2010 talk. It was never a controlled study. It was a picture built from public posts, cited ever since as if it had settled the question, when in fact it had only opened one.
