There's not much science going on here, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a process. We started with several bags of Sweethearts from several local retailers.

Sort
Over a period of many months, and with help from numerous friends, we gouped the Sweethearts by message into 100 cups. A lot of sorting happened during an Easter gathering. It was pretty instructive to see who gravitated toward this activity. Among several sources of error, guests could not be prevented from eating the data.

Count
We then counted the number of Sweethearts in each cup, logging the message and the count in an Excel document.

Analyze
Messages were then assigned values – really late at night – on three squishy parameters. 1) Direction: whether the message is from suitor to suitee, vica verse, from a third party outside the couple. 2) Togetherness: whether the message encourages or discourges union between the couple. 3) Intensity: the amplitude of the encouraging or discouraging message.

Synthesize
Lastly, we started looking for interesting patterns. Most of what we found is on the Meaning page. Tell us if you find anything else or do any of your own analysis. The data is all on the Tally page.