Overly Attached Girlfriend

Origin: a Justin Bieber contest entry¶

The meme has a named creator who made it deliberately. Laina Morris, born June 22, 1991 and raised in Denton, Texas, uploaded a video to her YouTube channel (then under the username wzr0713) on June 6, 2012. It was an entry to a Justin Bieber contest inviting fans to write a “Girlfriend” counterpart to his single “Boyfriend,” and Morris took the assignment somewhere Bieber’s team had not anticipated: she rewrote the lyrics from the point of view of a possessive partner and performed them staring directly into the camera, barely blinking, smiling the whole way through.

The video reportedly passed 170,000 views on its first day and 1.35 million within 48 hours.

How it became a macro¶

Reddit converted it into a format almost immediately. On June 7, 2012 — one day after upload — user yeahhtoast submitted the video in a thread titled “Overly Attached Girlfriend,” which drew more than 800 comments in seven hours. A Quickmeme page for the new advice-animal character went up the same day, along with a parody Twitter account. Within three days of Morris being publicly identified on June 16, she had reportedly gained over 7,800 Twitter followers and 16,500 Facebook likes.

That speed is the notable part. Most 2012 reaction faces were harvested from people who had no idea they were being memed; this one went from upload to fully formed advice animal in about 24 hours, with the subject watching it happen.

Meaning and usage¶

The unblinking stare became the face of clingy, obsessive and possessive behaviour. Captions play up jealous surveillance and over-attachment, as in “You went out without me? I know. I was watching.” It is deployed whenever someone acts a little too attached, or — more often — to joke about one’s own possessiveness. The tone is comically unsettling: sweet and smiling on the surface, quietly alarming underneath, with the humour resting entirely on the gap between the two.

The creator kept control of it¶

Rather than being flattened by the meme, Morris built a career on it. She kept a Thursday upload schedule, produced further parodies of songs by Carly Rae Jepsen, Drake and Taylor Swift, appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and turned the character into paid work — a Samsung commercial in November 2012 and a RealPlayer Cloud advertisement in September 2013 among them. Her channel reportedly reached more than 1.25 million subscribers and 161 million views by December 2021.

In July 2019 she announced she was stepping away from YouTube, citing depression and anxiety she had been dealing with behind the scenes; she had posted little in the preceding two years. She returned on June 6, 2022, exactly ten years after the original upload, to mark the meme’s anniversary both in and out of character.

Legacy¶

Overly Attached Girlfriend is one of the definitive reaction faces of the early 2010s and one of the first to be created, rather than found, by its subject. In April 2021 the original image sold as an NFT for a reported $411,000, one of the higher figures paid in the wave of classic-meme NFT sales that year. It sits with Bad Luck Brian, Scumbag Steve and Success Kid as a core character of the advice-animal era — with the distinction that its subject wrote the joke first.