The dumpiest day of the year: December 6th

If your relationship is on thin ice, you've got a month to figure it out. According to the laws of love, Monday, December 6th will be the last window of opportunity to call it quits this year.

If you miss that deadline here what will happen: you'll be swept into office party week, a time when colleagues finally get to meet your partner. The stakes are raised even more by the following two weeks when you may end up meeting each other's families, or you may just forget how annoying you are to each other with a little distance and some parental pep talks. So maybe you'll give it another shot, after all it's nice to have someone to kiss on New Years. And hey, you can always reassess come January, but why would you do that when Valentine's day is coming up? See where this is going? Til death do you part.

While there's no pure science, the date is based on a few factors. A recent breakdown of 10,000 Facebook status updates suggests that the most popular time in the year to breakup is two weeks before Christmas. Also Mondays are big. There are virtually no breakups charted after that till at least Valentine's day, but even then it's pretty low till mid-March. That long swath of time may be painful to even consider if you're with someone you just can't stand but haven't gotten the nerve to drop.

Such was the case for a male friend of mine, who invented the concept of the 'dump date' as far as I can tell. A nice, happily married non-commitment phobic guy now, this friend was once in a stilted relationship several years ago. Being the nice guy he is, he found it tricky to cut the cord. As weeks past, and their relationship grew longer, he found himself treading in a panic through romantic quicksand."The case was that I had a window in September to break up, because the woman's birthday was in October, mine was in November, and then you get into the holidays -- and you're frozen from like two weeks through maybe Jan. 14," says this friend who asked to remain anonymous for fear of sounding like a jerk. "I thought if I didn't get out in September, then I think the next window was Earth Day."

Not all of us have the birthday problem, which means we're free and clear for a December send off. This friend suggests a very brief window comes again in mid January for about a week or two before Valentine's paraphernalia starts haunting stores. But the Facebook chart suggests that no one really ever gets the nerve to do it then. Maybe it's the lingering hangover from New Years.