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The woman beside the distracted man was not revealed to have a secret real-life history. She was a stock-photo model, identified in reporting by the professional name Laura, who appeared in a much larger set of staged images. Twitter users recognized her in those pictures and turned the repetitions into a comic fictional backstory.
What the distracted-boyfriend meme shows
The photograph depicts a man turning to look at another woman while the woman walking beside him looks back at him in apparent disapproval. In the familiar meme format, users add labels to the people or situation: the man represents a tempting distraction, the woman beside him an existing commitment, and the other woman a competing choice. Those labels were added later; they are not part of the original photograph.
The pose communicates distraction and betrayal without dialogue, which makes the image easy to adapt to arguments about products, ideas, habits, or priorities. The meme began circulating around January 2017 and became broadly popular in August, according to a 2018 account by Scroll. These are reported milestones, not a definitive timestamp for the meme’s first use. The stock photograph itself existed before its internet life.
The photograph was staged for a stock-photo series
Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem made the image as part of a commercial stock-photography series about infidelity and relationship drama. The stock caption reported by Scroll described a “Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl.” It describes the staged scene, not a real event.
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The models were publicly identified in the report by the professional or stage names Mario and Laura. The available account establishes that they modeled together; it does not establish that they were a real-life couple. “Girlfriend” refers to Laura’s role in the photograph’s fictional setup, while meme captions assign entirely different meanings to the figures.
Guillem reportedly said the session was planned around infidelity but played in an exaggerated, humorous way. He was unfamiliar with memes before the image spread online, and the models reportedly alerted him to its popularity. He made the stock photo; internet users supplied the meme format and its captions.
Rank #2
- High-quality framed canvas wall art featuring a humorous Japanese woodblock style print of a distracted samurai looking at another woman while his outraged partner glares.
- Sleek and elegant gold frame provides a luxurious, polished border that beautifully enhances the vivid teal, rich cinnabar red, and soft cream tones of this amusing parody.
- Printed on archival-grade textured canvas with strong ink outlines, capturing the authentic grain and aged paper feel of ancient traditional prints.
- A perfect conversational piece and funny wall decor for living rooms, offices, bedrooms, game rooms, or studios seeking a blend of classic culture and modern internet humor.
- Arrives ready to hang right out of the box with pre-installed hanging hardware, making it a wonderful housewarming gift for lovers of Japanese art and memes alike.
Ernie Smith finds Laura in other stock photos
On June 25, 2018, Twitter user Ernie Smith posted a thread tracing the woman in the meme through other stock photographs by Guillem, as Scroll recounts. In the unrelated staged scenes, the same model appears reacting to screens and laptops, with friends, in different clothes and glasses, reading a letter, and looking surprised even when no obvious device is present.
Smith’s comic move was to treat the recurring expression as a personality trait: perhaps this woman was always startled by something. But the pictures are separate commercial scenarios, not episodes in a documented biography. Their continuity comes from recognizing the same model and arranging the images into a story.
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Rank #3
- High-quality framed canvas wall art featuring a humorous Japanese woodblock style print of a distracted samurai looking at another woman while his outraged partner glares.
- Sleek and elegant gold frame provides a luxurious, polished border that beautifully enhances the vivid teal, rich cinnabar red, and soft cream tones of this amusing parody.
- Printed on archival-grade textured canvas with strong ink outlines, capturing the authentic grain and aged paper feel of ancient traditional prints.
- A perfect conversational piece and funny wall decor for living rooms, offices, bedrooms, game rooms, or studios seeking a blend of classic culture and modern internet humor.
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Andrew J. Abernathy had already made a relationship saga
Smith’s thread was distinct from an earlier sequence by Andrew J. Abernathy, posted November 20, 2017. Abernathy presented more than 40 related images, according to the count attributed to his post in Scroll’s report, as a continuing tale about the pair.
Its imagined incidents included homework troubles, an expensive purchase, bad news, the boyfriend leaving, and the woman taking him back or reconsidering the relationship. These captions turn stock scenes into an internet soap opera; they are jokes, not evidence about Mario’s or Laura’s actual lives.
Rank #4
- High-quality framed canvas wall art featuring a humorous Japanese woodblock style print of a distracted samurai looking at another woman while his outraged partner glares.
- Sleek and elegant gold frame provides a luxurious, polished border that beautifully enhances the vivid teal, rich cinnabar red, and soft cream tones of this amusing parody.
- Printed on archival-grade textured canvas with strong ink outlines, capturing the authentic grain and aged paper feel of ancient traditional prints.
- A perfect conversational piece and funny wall decor for living rooms, offices, bedrooms, game rooms, or studios seeking a blend of classic culture and modern internet humor.
- Arrives ready to hang right out of the box with pre-installed hanging hardware, making it a wonderful housewarming gift for lovers of Japanese art and memes alike.
Why the “history” is funny
- Repeated models: A stock-photo shoot or image catalog can reuse the same people in many scenarios, making unrelated pictures look like a shared world.
- Expression as character: A repeated surprised look can seem like a stable trait once viewers recognize the model.
- Narrative-making: Captions impose a chronology and motive on images that were not made as a sequence.
- Collaboration: One user spots the other images; others add captions, connections, and new episodes.
The result is less an investigation into private lives than a collaborative act of recognition and storytelling. The “girlfriend’s history” is the internet’s improvised narrative for a stock-photo character.
Was the image inspired by Charlie Chaplin?
Some Twitter users noticed a resemblance between the composition and a still from Charlie Chaplin’s 1922 film Pay Day. Scroll’s account summarizes a Snopes clarification: the resemblance does not establish that Guillem or the models knowingly copied the scene, and direct influence was not verified. A person looking away from a partner is a broad visual situation, not proof of a source or plagiarism.
What the online backstory does—and does not—tell us
The documented story is that a pre-existing stock photograph became a meme, then users found the same model in other commercial images and built fictional continuity around them. It does not reveal a real romance, breakup, or private history. The shift from stock catalog to internet soap opera is the joke: the photographs supplied recurring faces, while Twitter supplied the plot.
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