Distracted Boyfriend
Where it came from
A stock photo by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem, shot in 2015. It started circulating as a meme in 2017 after someone in a Turkish prog-rock Facebook group used it to represent a guy leaving Phil Collins for newer music.
A guy walks down the street with his girlfriend and very obviously cranes his neck to check out another woman. His girlfriend notices. The whole joke is you label the three people with whatever you want: the boyfriend is "me", the other woman is "the thing I should not be doing", the girlfriend is "the thing I said I was going to do". It works because the expressions are so clean — dude is caught, girlfriend is furious, other woman is oblivious.
It blew up in 2017 and became one of the defining image macros of the late 2010s. At one point the Spanish advertising authority literally ruled it was sexist. That didn't slow it down. It's still one of the first memes people reach for when they need a "tempted by X, ignoring Y" setup.
The weird afterlife: the photographer kept shooting sequels with the same models for years, and most of them got turned into memes too. There's a whole cinematic universe of stock-photo infidelity out there.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
