UPDATE: Redditor jealous of girlfriend with Žižek photo is totally cool with it

The other day I reported on a redditor whose girlfriend’s photo of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was causing tension in their relationship.

To recap that story: Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl has photo of Žižek hanging on her wall, boy is upset, Reddit tells boy he’s seriously, seriously blowing things out of proportion.

The original Reddit post went up last month; last night, we got an update. The redditor/boy, throwaway9ru48r84u, has posted again on the Reddit r/relationships board with good news: “I was overreacting in that post and am happy to say that Slavoj Žižek is no longer interfering with our relationship.”

After his initial post, the Redditor explains, he decided to just ask his girlfriend about Žižek:

I’d just been curious and as long as she loves me more than him, there’s no issue. She thought it was hilarious that I had been jealous of this Slavoj Zizek guy which in retrospect it kind of is.

But the news coverage of the post ended up returning to (temporarily) haunt the poster:

Today my girlfriend Sam told me two of her friends in her program, Cat and Margaret, were freaking out about some Reddit post going around on philosophy sites they read. One is a site for a bookstore called Verso, then there’s one called criticaltheory, and a few Facebook pages and groups for similar content that they’re in. Needless to say it was my post here from a month ago, and they showed it to Sam because they know she has that picture in her room.

He says that while his girlfriend was “part appalled and part amazed” at her newfound internet fame, and a little annoyed, she’s gotten past the initial shock and is kind of into the whole situation now. She even has a newfound hope that “Zizek [will] see one of the blog posts about my OP and weigh in himself on the situation.”

r/relationship’s reactions are mostly laughter, some continued skepticism that this whole thing is a hoax, and more commenters trying to show off their Žižek knowledge.

Plus, the original poster has decided to read some Žižek himself:

[A]pparently his work is pretty accessible, like he talks about movies and wrote ads for Abercombie and so on, seems like he’s more in touch with regular people than most philosophers whose jargon I have trouble with. So all’s well that ends well even if not as expected I suppose.

Looks like he might be in for another surprise.

Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]