Distracted boyfriend meme

Photo via Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock (Licensed) Remix by Jason Reed

There’s a new backstory for the distracted boyfriend—and it’s brilliant

The internet still loves this story of a stock photo couple.

Tiffany Kelly 

Tiffany Kelly

Internet Culture

Published Nov 21, 2017   Updated May 22, 2021, 10:27 am CDT

The “distracted boyfriend” meme, in which people put various captions on a stock photo of a man checking out another woman while in the company of his partner, went viral in August. Months later, people are still looking into the other stock images that feature the models in the popular meme, thanks to photographer Antonio Guillem’s publicly accessible portfolio. When the meme first went viral, people started creating fan-fiction stories from these images. And apparently the internet is not tired of them.

On Monday, Andrew J Abernathy posted several of the stock photos to Twitter and wrote a story for the couple in them.

Andrew tweeted that he “wasn’t aware” of similar stories that featured the stock photo couple, even though it’s been repeatedly covered online.

But the internet didn’t seem to mind. The Twitter thread was widely praised.

https://twitter.com/ScotsFyre/status/932931069388529664

https://twitter.com/2CynicAl65/status/932981289141047298

Long live the distracted boyfriend meme.

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*First Published: Nov 21, 2017, 12:48 pm CST

Tiffany Kelly

Tiffany Kelly is the culture editor at Daily Dot. Previously, she worked at Ars Technica and Wired. Her writing has appeared in several other print and online publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Popular Mechanics, and GQ.

Tiffany Kelly