It's common knowledge that part of the human experience in 2017 is cringeworthy, unintentional exchanges with your parents over text. When that happens, though, it's more often than not a parental who accidentally misfires and sends something inappropriate (read: the "WHO DID THIS TO MY INNOCENT MOTHER !!!!" tweet that went viral last month). Today, though, we pour one out for one of our own, because in a rare moment of role reversal, a guy named Maison Vallance accidentally sent his mom a super NSFW picture of his girlfriend that is making the entire internet cringe in sympathy.
UPDATE: Bustle has heard back from Maison Vallance, who writes to Bustle about the experience of this going viral, "It blows my mind. I was not prepared for all the exposure. Two accounts with over 2+ million followers released articles on this. People from Africa to UK have been laughing about it and that makes my heart happy. If I can, even for just a second, bring a goofy smile to someone’s face from all around the world, then I can be content."
EARLIER: Vallance, who lives in Tennessee, only recently started dating Meghan, the girlfriend starring in said NSFW picture. The pair are super precious and, in keeping with that preciousness, Vallance recently introduced Meghan to his mom. A perfect storm apparently converged when Vallance's mom asked him to find a shirt she'd given him. To show her that the shirt was alive and well, he took a picture of it to text her — an adorable picture, mind you, with Meghan posing with the shirt draped over her on his bed. "I took this picture to let my Momma know I found the shirt she got me, but Meghan is too pretty not to post [i]t," Vallance wrote on Twitter, where he posted the image after sending it to his mom.
I'll give you a second to try to figure out what exactly makes this photo so ~NSFW~, because honestly, I had to give up and read the comments. To be fair, even Vallance himself didn't notice — it took people in the comments bringing it to his attention.
But true to form, once you see it, you can't un-see it.
Cue the panic.
The thread has since gone viral, and actually elicited a lot of hilarious, relatable, and sex-positive responses from other users — at least, the users who could spot it. Apparently I was not alone in my confusion.
At one point someone even asked how the set up worked ("Home Depot family. The hooks are $1.20 a piece and the rope was $15 for 100 feet. Cut it in 10 foot sections with 1 30 foot section," Vallance tweeted back.)
In return for his advice, some users tried to help Vallance come up with ideas for what he could tell his mom.
Another even photoshopped the ropes out of the image (file this one under "too little, too late").
A few even shared some mutual "welp, my parents have discovered this thing I never anticipated them discovering" horror stories of their own.
It turns out, though, there may be no reason to panic just yet. Vallance shared the screenshot of the text he sent to his mom in iMessage, and luckily, the preview of the image doesn't actually show the ropes — meaning she probably didn't click open and see them.
Less luckily, this story just went so viral that Vallance's grandchildren's grandchildren will probably be laughing about it from their sky pods on Mars. Not to worry, though — Vallance has every intention of telling his mom himself.
"I think it will be funny and I'll just say, OK, let's forget about this now," he said to BuzzFeed News, also mentioning that he and his mother are pretty open and "comfortable" with each other. Seeing as his mother reportedly gets along well with Meghan, odds are this will be a laugh.
In the meantime, kids, check your texts. Check 'em twice. And if you accidentally post a picture of the ropes you hung up over your bed, pull a Vallance and Meghan and own it the best you can.
