Cuddling Couple Watching TV / Quarantine Couple

About

Couple Cuddling Watching TV (also called "Quarantine Couple") is an exploitable image macro meme remixed to show the two people laying on a bed watching different types of media. It is associated with other memes featuring the same subject like Couple Watching a Movie From Bed but became especially prominent in the fall of 2022 as a Twitter Video Combinations meme.

Origin

The original picture was created by artist Daiyaan Colá, who first posted it on Facebook on April 24th, 2020, receiving almost 8,000 likes and over 121,000 shares.^[7] (seen below).

Daiyaan Colá calls the people in the meme "quarantine couple, because I originally did the design around May 2020 during the quarantine lockdowns."^[1] Colá's signature originally appeared on the woman's thigh in the earliest version of the meme, but was later placed directly above the pillow the woman in the meme rests on (seen below). The original drawing seems to represent lifestyles during the pandemic lockdowns which involved weed, fast food, Netflix and loved ones offering comfort to each other.

Spread

Throughout May of 2020, remixes of the meme spread across several platforms, each meme changing the type of media which the couple watched or the assortment of objects scattered around them on the bed. Tumblr^[3] user obliviat9e posted an example on May 18th, 2020 (seen below) which earned almost 6,300 notes in two years.

On August 1st, 2022, a post of the meme to /r/wholesomememes (seen below) by u/JoshDaBoiOnReddit ^[4] earned over 101,000 likes, bringing the meme to what seems to have been its widest audience yet.

On October 7th, 2022, the meme was adapted (after several others, such as Pope Francis Holding Things ) to the Twitter Video Combinations trend, replacing what had been a screen grab or still image of the media which the couple watched with a moving video as the upper-right-hand panel in the four-panel spread recently permitted by a Twitter^[2] update which went live on October 4th, 2022. The earliest findable post of this type came from @crypto_bitlord 7 on October 7th, 2022 (seen below) and earned almost 650 likes.^[5] The crypto community had frequently expressed a fondness for the meme format before, possibly because of its representation of an idealized heterosexual relationship, a frequent topic of discussion in crypto communities.

Over the course of the weekend of October 8th-9th, several more memes remixing various media into the four-panel picture were posted, including Twitter's^[6] @shreketc, a Shrek meme page which on October 9th posted an example (seen below) that earned over 700,000 likes in a day.]

Related Memes

Twitter Video Combinations

Twitter Video Combinations are a Twitter feature that allows uploading up to four separate videos in one tweet that was added in October 2022. Following the addition of the feature, posts in which four videos were arranged in a matching order, similar to Twitter Image Combination Memes, were popularized on the app, as well as other memes combining videos for humorous effect.

Couple Watching A Movie From Bed

Couple Watching A Movie From Bed also known as Is This Too Much to Ask For, refers to a viral artwork by South Korean artist 0g_maru in which a couple is lying on a bed and watching a movie from a computer screen. In April 2020, the image gained popularity as an exploitable on Twitter and Facebook, with footage on screen replaced with humorous images, similar to I'll Take This Over an Expensive Night Out Any Day format.

Various Examples

External References