Distracted Boyfriend: a Meme and its Fan-Fiction

A meme doesn’t tell much of a story. But sometimes, there’s an exception.

I have to assume that anybody reading this has seen the “distracted boyfriend meme.” As of 2023, you could probably say “distracted boyfriend meme” in casual conversation and many people would get the joke. It’s about five years old today. If you are reading this in the far future, it’s a “reaction meme”: an almost cartoonish example of an exaggerated emotional response. You can use reaction memes to mock people, organizations, historical figures, animals - and, if you’re even slightly self-aware, yourself.

You can make your own memes at https://imgflip.com/, just search for “distracted”. As of January 2023, anyway.

In this case, the central figure (the boyfriend) is obviously distracted from his outraged girlfriend by an indistinct second woman, who is oblivious to his gaze. The expressions sell it: the blatant but somehow toothless ogling by the boyfriend, and the very relatable disgust from the woman holding his hand. It’s made funnier by the fact that - in this frame, anyway - the two women are more or less interchangeable.

The narrow depth of field means that whatever attraction the mystery woman holds is invisible to the viewer. The guy becomes an archetype for every person who ignores what they already have in favor of the most fleeting distraction.

And that would be the end of it. Except.

Memes may appear to spontaneously generate across social networks, but the images they use are created by somebody. (This statement is not going to age well - thanks, AI-generated art!) The cast of this meme are real people who have been photographed more than once. And, the internet being what it is, that means there are more memes.

Most obviously, there is the gender-swapped version. This time, it’s the girlfriend (different guy) distracted by an equally vague dude in a polo shirt. This one is less popular, but it’s still out there. The girlfriend’s expression remains the selling point, the guys are a little less evocative (in my opinion). The message is the same, although the role reversal means the coding is a little more layered.

So what?

Memes are always variations on a single message, but they are usually more linear than this.

Usually, a single image prompts the first instance of a meme. The result is so relatable that it takes on a life of its own, and is repurposed hundreds of times to suit different audiences, in-groups, and ideologies. If a meme is a story at all, it is a story distilled into a single impression, a moment in time—retold over and over. A piece of a story.

So what happens when you go back to the source and pick up more pieces? Aside from testing the limits of Fair Use in this blog post?

These photos were taken in 2015 by Antonio Guillem, a professional stock photographer in Barcelona, Spain.

Antonio Gulliem works with the same models a lot. Good for him.

This is not breaking news: you can read more about him in this Wired article from 2017. He was as surprised as anyone to find out that one of his photos had gone viral—the article describes this as “a few weeks of virality”, which is pretty funny when the meme is still going strong five years later. Mr. Guillem has over 17,000 photos online at Shutterstock, if you would like to use his photos professionally or simply see the rest of his work.

This means that there is a deep well of photos to draw from, and people have. Grabbing other photos of the same models, folks have offered comebacks to the original meme and suggested various plotlines. Stock photos are designed to be plug-and-play, blank slates you can use to tell your own narrative. They have no story of their own. Nevertheless, any time you place two photos together (however tenuously linked), a story emerges.

My favorite is the version that made the rounds in 2019: the lesbian love story, where Ignored Girlfriend and Fantasy Woman meet, date, and eventually marry, leaving Distracted Boyfriend alone with his tears. This was faithfully reported by Pride.com in this post by Taylor Henderson.

I doubt this is what Mr. Guillem imagined. In fact, I am sure it is not - the penultimate photo in the “lesbian happy ending” distracted boyfriend story does not appear to be from the same series. I can’t find the original, but I suspect there is an actual wedding taking place with brides who look enough like our stock models that our minds accept them without looking too hard at their faces.

Happy ending, gay wedding edition, from Pride.com.

Is this the darkest timeline? From Shutterstock.com.

Which means that somebody loved this narrative so much that they were willing to fill in the blanks to tell the story the way they wanted it to end. And who can blame them? A search for “cheating” among Mr. Guillem’s photos brings us to a dark place of betrayal and broken hearts. A wedding is definitely a better ending for everyone involved.

This meme doesn’t just have fans, it has fan-fiction, slash-fiction, and alternate endings.

Both memes and stock photos are arguably anti-stories. They don’t tell a story themselves, they latch on to the stories we already have in our heads. Distracted Boyfriend and Ignored Girlfriend are not real characters, but we recognize them—and we want to write their endings. We want to write multiple endings to suit our own preferences.

And so, the distracted boyfriend meme becomes a story prompt that spawns a multiverse. strangers explore a handful of the infinite possibilities, creating a shared world of fiction. The difference between this fan-crafted universe and those built around, say, Sherlock Holmes or Oz is a difference of scale only. It’s the same type of edifice, but instead of standing on the shoulders of dead authors, it rests on a single leg, a no-context image overlaid with three noun phrases.

I love that we do this. I love that we—random writers in our various social networks—can’t just leave this story untold. We are wired to take a prompt and run with it, to follow the story to its dramatic conclusion, no matter how unlikely the inspiration.

There is no human moment so trivial, banal, or absurd that we won’t make a story out of it.

That’s a hopeful thought, given the amount of trivial and absurd content that our society turns out on a regular basis. It’s nice to think that there will always be somebody willing to take a commodity and write it into our collective mythology more or less on a whim.

The distracted boyfriend meme is probably in its final days. Five years is a long time for a viral phenomenon, and this one is past due to join cats that can haz cheezburgers and inner-monologuing doges (wow). With it goes the in-jokes and the wisp of a mythology that sprouted from it. It’s a piece of history now, which you can read about on its wikipedia page.

So if this is the last time you see the distracted boyfriend meme in the wild, I hope you’ll take at least a second to remember the characters that lived, and loved, and reacted… for all of us.