Distracted boyfriend

Distracted boyfriend is an Internet meme based on a 2015 stock photograph by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem. Social media users started using the image as a meme at the start of 2017, and it went viral in August 2017 as a way to depict different forms of disloyalty. The meme has inspired various spin-offs and received critical acclaim.

The stock image was taken in the city of Girona in Catalonia, Spain, in mid-2015 by photographer Antonio Guillem from Barcelona. Guillem told Wired that he and the stock image models planned on having a session that would represent the concept of infidelity "in a playful and fun way". The boyfriend and girlfriend in the photograph are known by their stage names "Mario" and "Laura". "Laura" later described the experience shooting the stock images, saying: "When people saw us simulate those scenes in the street, they stopped to look and laugh and, in my case that I had to have a more serious face, I had a hard time to keeping it [sic]".

The image was uploaded to Shutterstock with the caption: "Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl". Regarding the copyright status of this image, Guillem has stated that his images "are subject to copyright laws and the license agreements of the microstock agencies. It's not allowed to use any image without purchasing the proper license in any possible way, so each one of the people that use the images without the license are doing it illegally. This is not the thing that really worries us, as they are just a group of people doing it in good faith, and we are not going to take any action, except for the extreme cases in which this good faith doesn't exist".

The first known use of the stock image as an internet meme was posted to a Turkish progressive rock Facebook group in January 2017. The post labeled the man as Phil Collins, who is being distracted from progressive rock by pop music. This meme was reposted on an English-language progressive rock Facebook page the next day, and then on Twitter on February 2, 2017. Later that month, the original stock photograph was shared on Instagram and got almost 30,000 likes.

The meme started going viral on August 19, 2017 after a Twitter user posted the photograph with the man labeled "the youth" being distracted from his girlfriend "capitalism" by "socialism". Another Twitter user copied this meme, getting retweeted more than 35,000 retweets and nearly 100,000 likes. The meme and its permutations went viral on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. The distracted-boyfriend meme is listed by Know Your Meme as an example of object labeling. The girlfriend in the meme generally came to represent something that one is supposed to do and the woman wearing red came to represent something more desirable or riskier.

The models "Mario" and "Laura" say they first learned about the memes based on their photograph when people started posting them to their social media accounts. In late August 2017, Guillem told The Guardian that "I didn't even know what a meme is until recently. The models discovered the meme on social media and they told me about it. None of us could imagine the media repercussion that it has reached right now".

Some brands started using the meme when it started going viral. In early January 2018, a version of the meme referencing the biblical story of Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt went viral on Twitter. The meme was used in a sign for the "Enough! National School Walkout" gun violence protest in March 2018. On June 25, 2018, Twitter user Ernie Smith noted other stock images in which the girlfriend from the original meme is surprised looking at screens.

In November 2020, it was used in a commercial for Jules, a French clothing company.