Overly Attached Girlfriend

Overly Attached Girlfriend is an advice animal and image macro meme themed around the concept of a clingy girlfriend who acts psychopathic and controlling towards her boyfriend.

Visually, the meme shows a girl who is staring into the camera straight to the viewer, having a wide smile and a cold look in her eyes, giving us the impression of a psycho.

People generally use the template of overly attached girlfriend to create memes of relatable situations and to make fun of girls who are control-freaks.

Overly attached girlfriend

The meme originates from a video, created by a former YouTuber called Laina.

She created a parody video on Justin Bieber’s 2012 pop hit Boyfriend, as part of a parody contest.

In the parody, titled “JB Fanvideo”, she takes up the role of the overly attached girlfriend, whose everyday activities consist of stalking her boyfriend continuously, planting recording devices up his sleeve, and other freaky things.

Her video has received over 21 million views over the years, and the first frame of the clip has become the template for the overly attached girlfriend meme.

Not long after Laina uploaded her parody on YouTube, the video got posted on Reddit and started to spread rapidly in various communities in a matter of just a few days, even outside Reddit, like on the image-captioning meme creative website QuickMeme.

After the spread, once overly attached girlfriend became well-recognized, people noticed that there is a parallel between the meme and an earlier animal advice meme “Crazy Girlfriend praying mantis”.

From June 2012 to January 2013, overly attached girlfriend was featured on several big media entities like Buzzfeed and BusinessInsider.

However, from 2013,  the meme saw a steep decline in popularity, and is rarely used on the Internet today.

• Reddit – Overly Attached Girlfriend
• Quickmeme – Overly Attached Girlfriend
• Business Insider – The Woman Behind ‘Overly Attached Girlfriend’ Meme Is Quitting YouTube