Distracted Boyfriend Meme (2017) - The Story Behind Mzansi's Viral Memory

The Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem shot the image in 2015 as part of a stock series about infidelity, using paid models in Girona. It sat on stock libraries for two years doing ordinary commercial work.

In January 2017 a Turkish music page used it to label three abstract concepts. In August 2017 the format reached English-speaking social media and became the dominant meme of that year, because the picture already contained a complete three-part argument: what you have, what you want, and the disapproval you will face.

There is no view counter for a still image, but the template was used in tens of millions of posts and reached billions of impressions across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in 2017 and 2018.

It also entered advertising, political campaigns and university lectures on semiotics. Few images have ever been repurposed at that scale while remaining instantly readable.

South Africa is a WhatsApp-first country, and a still image is the perfect WhatsApp forward. It loads on a two-bar signal, it costs almost no data, and it survives being screenshotted twenty times without becoming unreadable.

Local versions labelled the three figures with things Mzansi argues about daily: Eskom versus solar, Kaizer Chiefs versus Orlando Pirates, salary versus month-end, taxi versus Uber, amapiano versus everything else. That is why it outlived the imported joke and became a local commentary tool.

Guillem has said he had no idea the photo would spread and initially pursued licensing questions. The models became recognisable in public, which was never part of the job description for stock work.

As of 2026 the template is still in active use, which makes it far more durable than almost any video meme. Formats that let people say their own thing outlive formats that only let people watch.