Overly Attached Girlfriend: The Origin, The Journey, and the Epilogue
Overly Attached Girlfriend has been a beloved shared meme on the internet for over five years and as most of us don’t search for the origin stories of every meme we find, everyone literally knew Laina Morris’ face but not her story.
The original meme is a photo of Morris looking wide-eyed with an overtly eager smile on her face. This meme has spread far and wide over the web onto your Facebook, Instagram, and twitter feed and to this day still circulates the web with new captions and old.
What may surprise you is that the origin of the meme actually came from a video that Morris posted on YouTube titled “JB Fanvideo.”
The video now has almost 20 million views to its name and showcases Morris singing a “crazy girlfriend” remix of the song Boyfriend by Justin Bieber. Watch the video yourself and have a laugh as Morris eloquently sings prose such as
“I’ll always be, checking up on you, hey boy, ‘who you talking to?’ If I was your girlfriend…”
The song definitely fits the meme sensation which is Overly Attached Girlfriend. Reddit user yeahhtoast thought the video was hilarious and screenshotted Morris and added the famous white text across most memes and a meme was born and it went viral.
So the question remains as to what happened after Morris’ meme celebrity status? Well Morris didn’t want to be known as just a meme, she decided to pursue her own YouTube channel and aside from a few videos following her success, she became a seperate entity from Overly Attached Girlfirend.
In an interview was refinery29 Morris tells how her meme status fame allowed her to focus on her dream of working in the entertainment sector. As her YouTube channel grew, she became a success with over 1 million subscribers. At one point in her YouTube career, Morris was making a six figure salary from entertaining.
But it wasn’t an easy trip from meme origin to YouTube success, Morris spoke about privacy issues following the memes success. “Strangers were finding my personal Facebook page and talking to my friends,” Morris recalls. “They were finding where I worked and trying to access my college records.”
She was able to guide herself into a successful career doing many radio shows, interviews, and posing with hundreds of fans of the meme and her YouTube channel.
Morris at almost 27 years old now focuses her attention on other sections of the entertainment industry and although Morris has not been active for six months on her YouTube page, there is always hope that the young creator will come back to YouTube and entertain us all once again.
With Morris’ killer success, it’s inspires us all to really put ourselves out there and do what we want to do. If your goals involve becoming an internet meme, put yourself out there like Laina Morris did and you may be the next viral meme to bless our feeds.
