This Is Not A Picture Of The 'Distracted Boyfriend' Models Ten Years Later

Over the weekend, a tweet by @jdpoc went viral. The tweet shows three people standing in front of a large portrait of the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme, reenacting the famous image with dead-on expressions. "The actual people from THAT meme, 10 years on …", wrote @jdpoc.

The actual people from THAT meme, 10 years on …. pic.twitter.com/SjW7PAwMbk

— John O'Connell (@jdpoc) March 13, 2021

The post gained over 240,000 retweets and an astounding 1.4 million likes, proving that everyone—and especially us at KnowYourMeme—loves a fun bit of internet history. The only issue, unfortunately, is that it's completely not true: the people in the photo are not the original models, Laura and Mario. We know this because we were there when this picture was taken.

In September of 2018, KnowYourMeme hosted a "Two Decades Of Memes" event at the Museum of Moving Images in Queens, New York, during which we "inducted" ten memes into an informal "Hall Of Fame." We made high-res prints of the selections—including "Distracted Boyfriend"—and hung them in chronological order around our event space to give visitors a sense of how memes had progressed in twenty years.

On the first night of the event, we hosted a party that was attended by some of our panelists and any interested guests. This is when podcasters and improv comedians Charlie Todd and Cody Livingston took the opportunity to cosplay "Distracted Boyfriend" in front of our high-res blowup of "Distracted Boyfriend." Data scientist Ulku Guneysu, coincidentally attending the event in the perfect shade of blue, jumped in to be the "jealous girlfriend" and complete the picture.

I love how the internet works – ah yes I’m “the girl in blue” https://t.co/Z6i1dXXC4f

— Ulku Guneysu (@UlkuGuneysu) March 14, 2021

This was all explained by Todd in a Reddit post posted roughly two weeks after the event when the internet began running with the picture as though they were the actual models.

Hey! I'm the guy in this photo. This was at a Know Your Meme party at the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC. They had a gallery of memes hanging on the wall. I noticed my wife was wearing a red dress so I suggested she pose in front of the girl in the photo. While I was taking her picture someone came up to me and asked if I wanted to be in it, so I hopped in. Then the girl in blue walked up and said, "Hey! Let me be the other girl!" The whole thing was spontaneous and random, and of course it happened on the one day in my life I'm not wearing a plaid shirt.

Todd went on to explain that after Guneysu posted the picture on Facebook, it was eventually spotted by Redditor /U/thecrazygoodguy, who on September 28th, 2018, reposted it to Reddit with the title, "They are old guys." The following day, Scrubs actor Zach Braff tweeted the image, writing, "This is how much 2018 has aged us all," cementing the mythos that Todd, Livingston, and Guneysu were the original "Distracted Boyfriend" trio, aged an indeterminate number of years.

This is how much 2018 has aged us all. pic.twitter.com/cmbQi7qyUw

— Zach Braff (@zachbraff) September 29, 2018

And that's the story of how we at KnowYourMeme, while attempting to commemorate meme history, inadvertently contributed to the lore of one of the most popular memes of the past two decades.