The meme takes another variation of a classic: one person explaining something into the ear of another bored-looking person. Unlike its predecessors, this one features a woman explaining to a man.
Just like other similar memes, it’s always paired with text, imagining what topic the girl is attempting to discuss in the ear of the uninterested male: from star signs to film plots and the Titanic ending scene.
“Bro I’m telling you, a Gemini cannot date a Scorpio, they’re incompatible when Venus aligns with Saturn bro, it emits a toxic aura bro,” envisioned one version of the meme.
With over half of 16- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. reporting looking at memes on any given day, according to a 2020 GlobalWebIndex survey, the meme has unsurprisingly managed to spread far and wide in just a short amount of time since beginning to trend this week.
What the woman in the actual picture was really saying however remained a mystery, until now. Users no longer have to speculate about what she was saying, though seeing the outcomes of the hilarious memes, they might want to anyway.
The meme first debuted on the internet in 2019, in Spanish. Just like how it is this time round, the meme took the exact same format. Now, three years later, it’s risen again and made its way to English-speaking meme lovers for the first time.
Denise Sanchez is the woman behind the meme and spoke to meme archive site Know Your Meme about what really went down. Sanchez explained that the picture was taken in 2018 at a nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina during a night out.
The man in the picture was her boyfriend at the time, she explained. “Now, he’s my ex,” she went on to clarify. Despite now being the center-focus of the picture, the couple just happened to be in the background of another club goers picture.
“I was featured in the newspaper in my city, many people followed me on Instagram and people have written to me and asked how it happened,” Sanchez told Know Your Meme.
“They have treated me like a toxic girlfriend too!” she said. “It’s funny to see how people draw conclusions from a photo and think they know a lot about how you are!”
Sanchez’s boyfriend in the photo might now be an ex, but it’s certainly not down to any “girlsplaining” like the meme would have you believe. Instead, she said she was simply attempting to sing a Cumbia song to him.
