About

At least I have a girlfriend is an image macro series featuring a picture of a young teen that goes in the style of "At least I have a(n) X"

Origin

On October 22nd, 2011, a post was made to 4chan claiming to be a young teenager, around the age of 14, or 15 began to brag to the people of /b/ saying things like "I have a girlfriend and you are too stupid and awkward to get one" and "At least I have a girlfriend." 4chan didn't take this too lightly and began to trash him and his pictures saying things like "At least I have a dentist." The thread continued eventually in 4chan finding his facebook, phone number, and even his home address. One commenter summed it all up nicely "One more life ruined"

Controversy

An email was received as a suggestion to this post. The sender said he was in fact the person pictured. His details checked out, and the email was in fact linked to the facebook where all the pictures posted in the thread came from. He says that it was not in fact him who made the 4chan posts, but someone he may know pretending to be him.

Spread

Two months later, on December 28th, 2011, at around 1 in the morning, a funnyjunk user by the name of numfortytwo posted what he called his best attempt at mashing together his screenshots of the thread in hopes to spread what happened.

The picture as posted to funnyjunk^[1]

Once on funnyjunk the meme spread. Numfortytwo posted the blank picture and a bunch of variants followed, of people such as Batman, the Penguin, Rosa Parks, Helen Keller, Dat Ash, and more. Eventually, other posters variants came to follow

Exploitable image

^[1] The post from funnyjunk http://funnyjunk.com