By Chao Min Wu and Pooja Pandey

Are you a superstitious person? You’ll most likely say no. But do you have enough faith in your partner to marry them on Friday the 13th? It’s not surprising given its infamously spooky lore that for the past 30 years, couples in Florida have veered away from getting married on this supposedly ominous day.

Irrational beliefs are often manifested in various forms such as the widespread notion in many cultures that a person’s fate may be influenced by a number. And as two designers coming from highly superstitious Asian countries, we were naturally curious to see how much faith Americans had in lucky and unlucky numbers.

According to the New York Times, nearly 2.5 million couples in the United States plan to tie the knot in 2022. However, choosing a wedding date is not easy and various factors can influence this decision-making.

Our research examines a dataset of 30 years of daily marriage rates in Florida from January 1989 to May 2022 in order to understand and visualize people’s fascination with numbers, luck, and the holidays. Check out our final interactive visualization here.

Process

Prior to beginning our project, we conducted a literature study to look at existing work and visualizations of superstitious behaviors related to weddings dates. The research informed us that this superstitious decision-making has had a nationwide impact.

We then retrieved our dataset from the Department of Health State of Florida consisting of 12204 days (starting January 1989 to May 2022) which documents the number of marriages per each individual date (e.g. January 1st, 1989, 373 marriages). We cleaned up the data by organizing it into four columns: day of the week, date, month, and year, and then manually adding ten national holidays and eight culturally celebrated holidays (Columbus Day, Eastern Easter, Friday the 13th, Valentine’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth, Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and Mexican Independence Day) for all relevant days over the past 33 years.

Tableau was our primary tool for early analysis in order to obtain insights into any patterns we might identify and to more thoroughly investigate any outliers surrounding the most popular wedding dates. During this stage, we examined our data and confirmed our initial hypothesis that superstitions have a significant impact on wedding dates.

Analysis and Implementation

We divided our data into three year groups, 1989–1999, 2000–2011, and 2012–2021. We then plotted each year group based on different factors by days, months, dates, and also popular holidays to evaluate if there was a change in pattern every decade or so. For more common findings like the most and least popular dates, days, and holidays, we used the consolidated data of all 33 years to find an average.

After drawing up interesting observations, we explored multiple ways to visualize every particular piece of finding. Considering all of our data was just numbers and dates, we realized that line graphs and bar charts were our safest bet. But we wanted our final infographic to be visually appealing and interactive. As a result, we exported the rudimentary graphs generated from our rookie how-to-get-started-with-tableau knowledge as SVG files and used Figma and Adobe Illustrator to work our magic.

Insights

Our most interesting findings from our analysis:

• People are growing less superstitious with time. Well, at least regarding Friday the 13th. Couples in Florida were 19.8171% less likely to marry on this day from 2012 to 2021 than they were in 1989–1999.
• The highest number of marriages take place on Saturdays and the lowest number of marriages take place on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays.
• From 1989 up till 2021, Feb 14th was a shocking outlier with 374.752% more marriages than the yearly average.
• People’s obsession with numbers are best seen in notable outliers throughout the 33 years. Dates such as July 7th, 2022 (3725 weddings) and November 11th, 2011 (3510 weddings) have 8 times the usual number (404.7) of married couples.

So, how superstitious are we?

Our final visualization includes five graphs that showcase our favorite insights. While this informational graphic tells a story, we concentrated on making the most critical data points visible at first look rather than letting our users investigate the data themselves.

You’re less superstitious than your parents, probably...

Between 1989 and 2011, only 328 to 338 couples married on Friday the 13th, compared to the 404 daily average. However, between 2012 and 2021, an average of 393 couples got married indicating a decline in avoidance.

But everyone is a bit paraskevidekatriaphobic

People don’t seem to like the number 13. People dislike this number so much that if it’s a 13th, whether Saturday or Sunday, they simply refuse to get married.

Our most common outlier

American get more excited about Valentine’s day than Christmas. A poll of 2,000 Americans found that this Hallmark holiday tops the charts among Americans, as 81% get excited about Feb. 14, while just 68% say they get excited about the holiday season.

Every year, February 14th sees such a high number of weddings that the marriage rate for this date is always an outlier of each year.

Holidays have their ups and downs

While it’s difficult to determine the reasons of whether marrying during the holiday is an attempt to make the wedding day more special, or if it’s easier to have guests take the day off and come celebrate with them, our analysis uncovered some fascinating wedding day patterns.

One-third of the 18 common holidays we looked at, had just half the average number of marriages as the total average. In fact, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Labor Day have some of the lowest marriage rates in the last 33 years, accounting for only one-eighth (51.6 couples) of the average (404.7 couples). However, holidays like as Cinco de Mayo, the Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, and Veterans Day appear to have higher, albeit not considerably higher, marriage rates than the norm.

Unique Dates

Do people find magic in numbers? It was observed that Palindromes, repetitive and sequential dates had the marriage rates rising up. The lucky 7s — July 7th 2007 or 7/7/7 recorded a whopping 3725 marriages in a day.

Conclusion

Superstition is a mindset humans can hardly be immune to till date. They are often harmless, but our visualizations should reveal how frequently people base important life decisions on the belief that human affairs are influenced by a mysterious force known as ‘luck’ rather than purposeful behavior and natural causes. People that marry on a special date or day, such as September 10th, 2011 or Valentine’s Day, in order to be unique and blessed, are, ironically, sharing their blessings with a bigger percentage of the public than they could have imagined.

So, if you want to get married on a genuinely unique date, you might want to change your plans from February 14th to the closest Friday the 13th near you!

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