The dreaded friend zone can be a perilous place for a single guy, one often takes a dash luck to escape from.

But for 18-year-old Johnny Solis of San Diego, all it took was a meme.

Solis is the inspiration behind the Friend Zone Johnny meme, an image of Solis holding flowers and what looks like a box of chocolates outside a girl named Lizz’s home. The image touched the hearts of thousands of single guys around the world after Lizz commented how “blessed” she was to have a friend like Johnny.

The five-day-old image propelled Solis to Internet stardom, thanks to a front-page post on Reddit. Since then, his life hasn’t been the same.

“Well at school when I’m walking around the hallways, people scream out ‘eyyy Friend Zone Johnny,’” Solis told the Daily Dot. “While I was driving around the person next to me asked if he could take a picture of me. Also my parents know and they constantly laugh at me and tell me to make shirts.”

In the last three days, Solis has collected more than 1,000 friends on Facebook (including this writer). He even got “married” to Lizz on Facebook a few days ago.

“Well our friendship is actually better, we see each other more now and I have known her since eighth grade because she was my friend’s girlfriend,” Solis said. “I got to know her freshmen year in French class. At first she was pissed that someone would do that to me, but eventually she started to roll along with all this too. And the whole married thing was her idea just to get some more laughs out of this.”

After graduating from high school, Solis would love to pursue a career in music but has decided to “come back to reality.” Instead, he wants to study criminal justice so he can become a police officer.

In the meantime, he’s content with being the meme machine known as Friend Zone Johnny.

“I mean, how do people get so creative?” he said. “ Props to all the Internet users who made fun of me, honestly you guys have the best insults.”

Photo from Johnny Solis