Meme Celebrities

Overly Attached Girlfriend: the stare that started a YouTube career

Laina Morris made a joke video for a Justin Bieber contest and stared into the camera a little too long. One frame of it became one of 2012's biggest memes.

In June 2012 Justin Bieber asked fans to film their own “Girlfriend” answer to his song “Boyfriend”. Laina Morris, a student from Denton, Texas, decided to make hers deliberately unsettling. On 6 June she uploaded a video in which she sings about never letting her boyfriend out of her sight - staring unblinking into the lens, with a smile that never moves.

One frame

Reddit found the video the same day and it passed 170,000 views within 24 hours. Someone took a still of her wide-eyed stare, added white text, and Overly Attached Girlfriend became the internet's shorthand for jealousy, clinginess and checking your phone while you're in the bathroom.

Overly Attached Girlfriend: You skip one lesson on the language app.

Turning a joke into a job

Instead of hiding from it, Morris leaned in. She kept making parody songs and sketches in character, worked with brands including Samsung, and grew her channel past a million subscribers. In 2019 she stepped back from YouTube to look after her mental health, and on the meme's tenth anniversary in 2022 she posted a video looking back at how one stare changed her life.

Watch her tell it

I Accidentally Became A Meme: Overly Attached Girlfriend (BuzzFeedVideo, YouTube)

Behind the Memes - Overly Attached Girlfriend (Laina, YouTube)

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