You know, memes really are everywhere these days. It's almost impossible to scroll down your Facebook feed and not encounter one: and image macros have become as commonplace as street graffiti. Once they were merely created and proliferated by a small and closeted bunch of early internet users, but now they've managed to breach the public's consciousness, and everyone can recognise at least a few of them. This year, one of the biggest memes to burst onto the scene was the 'Distracted boyfriend meme.'
The image macro was originally taken by photographer Antonion Guillem, and then posted on the stock photo database iStock with the caption: "Disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl" (shown below, left). However, the earliest iteration of the photograph when used as a meme with a caption did not occur until January 30th, 2017. The Turkish Facebook page Prog Düşmanlarına Verilen Müthiş Cevaplar posted the image, with captions identifying the man as Phil Collins. The woman that catches his eye was captioned as 'pop music' while his snubbed girlfriend was named 'prog music.'
After this initial example circulated the web, the meme exploded in popularity, and soon dozens of other iterations of the meme began to appear. Now a hapless netizen has ended up accidentally recreating the meme in real life. A Twitter user going by the handle "Amahle" snapped a picture of her friend strolling down an alleyway, about to tuck into a delicious scoop of chilled ice cream.
But the friend in question wasn't the only one eyeing up the delicious ice cream cone. Neither the subject nor the photographer noticed that a certain male bystander had had his head turned by the scoop of vanilla. The man's girlfriend didn't seem to notice that he was somewhat distracted.
No sooner had the two woman gotten home and examined their snaps, they soon noticed that the photo was weirdly reminiscent of a certain popular meme. Amahle promptly uploaded the picture to Twitter, and captioned it: "Yall my friend was just tryna take a pic with her ice cream but something about it looked too familiar. [sic]"
Other Twitter users soon joined the discussion, and some even believed that Amahle had managed to captured two memes in one. If you look closely, you might noticed that the man's expression looks very similar to the "It's free real estate" meme (which was spawned out of a screenshot of alternative comedian Tim Heidecker in the Adult Swim series Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job!).
However, other people were more interested in the girl with the ice cream herself, with one person tweeting: "Ice cream girl @trishnapema should do a series of photos holding all things that she likes/loves and looking at them the way she's looking at that ice cream." I guess it just goes to show the memes really are starting to bleed into reality. Who knows? Maybe if you check your own Instagram account you might notice a few accidental recreations of your own.