Distracted boyfriend
Stock-photo love triangle for disloyalty and preference jokes.
Meaning
Distracted boyfriend is a 2015 stock photo used as a love-triangle joke. The boyfriend looks at a woman in red while his girlfriend stares at him. Users deploy it with irony to rank a temptation above a current choice.
Origin
Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem shot it as stock in 2015. Captioning as a meme began at the start of 2017. It went viral in August 2017 for disloyalty jokes, though the exact first poster is unidentified.
How it's used
Authors label the girlfriend as the old option, the boyfriend as the chooser, and the passerby as the new option. The form is a 3-label image macro. As a name it is a noun phrase and does not inflect.
Example
He labeled the Distracted boyfriend trio as sleep, work, and one more video.
Variants & related
It is also called Man Looking at Other Woman. Spin-offs redraw the trio, while related choice memes include Two Buttons and Drake Hotline Bling.
Common misunderstandings
It is staged stock, not a candid street photo. The joke targets divided attention and reveals nothing about the models.