I Have Two Sides

Origin¶

“I have two sides” is a duality format that pairs two contrasting images to describe a person’s, character’s, or thing’s split nature. The earliest widely circulated version documented by Know Your Meme is a December 26, 2018 tweet by @chamington1, which showed a photo of a young man split down the middle and captioned the halves with nothing more revealing than “the left side, the right side.” The anticlimax was the joke: the phrase promises hidden depth and delivers basic symmetry. An earlier ancestor sits on iFunny, dated September 12, 2013, where user 173late_2013 posted the same “two sides” setup with a long, sincere explanation of clashing personality traits — the unironic version the meme would spend the next several years mocking.

Spread¶

Reddit did most of the work. The @chamington1 image was reposted to r/comedyheaven, where it collected more than 14,000 points at 98 percent upvoted and 110 comments over the following two years, and it circulated alongside r/im14andthisisdeep as a specimen of accidental profundity. From there it moved onto Instagram and iFunny meme pages through 2019:

• A 2019 variation from Instagram account @nauseatingnut drew more than 1,850 points on its Reddit crosspost.
• An April 2019 Spider-Man version by @benis.barker picked up more than 3,300 likes within a year.

By the early 2020s the phrasing had detached from any single image and settled into a general-purpose caption, which is why the template is commonly dated to around 2021 rather than to its 2018 source post. A single canonical origin is genuinely hard to pin down, because what spread was the sentence, not the picture.

How the format works¶

The wording is fixed and the payload is not. Above the panels sits the line “I have two sides,” and below it two images show whatever contrast the poster wants to claim: calm versus chaotic, wholesome versus feral, put-together versus falling apart. The phrasing is the constant; the two images swapped in are what make each version specific. Documented variants substitute other pairings entirely — nautical “port and starboard” edits, character-specific versions, and deliberately literal splits of a single photograph.

Meaning and usage¶

It is a self-aware admission that a person contains multitudes, played for comedy by pairing images that clash as sharply as possible. People use it for their own dual nature, for a fictional character who is soft in one scene and terrifying in the next, for a pet, a brand, or a mood that flips by the hour. Because the caption does the framing, almost any two images become a joke once stacked underneath it. In that sense it belongs with Drakeposting and We Are Not the Same — reusable grammar rather than a fixed image macro.

There is a second, more sardonic register. Played straight, the meme reads as a confession. Played ironically, it needles the kind of person who treats having a “dark side” as a personality. The r/im14andthisisdeep crowd adopted it for exactly that reason, and a good share of its 2019 spread came from posts mocking the format while using it.

Notable examples¶

• A serene image beside a chaotic one to sum up a split personality.
• Characters presented as gentle in one panel and menacing in the other.
• Fandoms, pets, or moods that swing between two extremes.
• Anticlimactic versions where the “two sides” are literally the left and right halves of one photo.