The Story Of Quarantine Couple

one meme's journey across the social web

On a quarantine evening in the spring of 2020, artist Daiyaan Colá “had just finished making dinner, I jumped on Instagram to browse for inspiration and I saw a post of a random couple cuddling and I got an idea to do something similar but I made the couple interracial instead.”

Daiyaan posted the cartoon on Facebook, and over the next three years it turned into a meme and journeyed across the internet: jumping from Reddit’s /r/wholesomememes to Elon Musk’s Twitter account, from Tumblr to TikTok, and captioned not just in English but in Turkish, Spanish, and many other languages.

At each step along its journey, the meme meant something different — and did a different kind of work for the people posting it. Daiyaan Colá says “I think it touched so many people because it was needed during a time of tension and confusion, with so much gloom going on at one time, I think a cool cartoo…