Timothee Yumyum — Young man in tweed newsboy cap with 'Timothée' chat header and 'Yumyum' message bubble overlay

Timothee Yumyum

2022catchphrasedeclining

Published August 15, 2026

Timothee Yumyum is a viral French Twitter drama from late December 2022 in which a young man named Timothee was exposed as a serial cheater after one of his girlfriends shared a text screenshot where he replied 'Yumyum' to a photo she had sent. French Twitter unraveled the affair in real time through flowcharts, cat memes, and jokes about his sexting style, turning 'Yumyum' into shorthand for cringe flirting.

french memes scandal memes relationship memes catchphrase memes cringe memes

Overview

Timothee Yumyum is a viral French Twitter thread from late December 2022 that exposed a young Frenchman named Timothee as a serial cheater, after one girlfriend posted a screenshot of him replying 'Yumyum' to a photo she had sent1. The awkward flirty reply became the visual anchor of the whole scandal and the phrase people latched onto3.

The story went from a private text screenshot to a full public unraveling when a second woman commented on the same tweet claiming Timothee was actually her boyfriend1. From there, French Twitter dug into the 'affaire Timothee,' mapping his overlapping relationships in flowcharts and rewriting his sext into cat jokes and riffs on his dead-eyed texting style46.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (French Twitter)
Creator
@coralinsane
Date
2022

On December 24th, 2022, Twitter user @coralinsane posted a screenshot of a text from a guy named Timothee that read 'Yumyum' in response to a photo she had sent1. Another user, @MathildePetit, replied to the tweet with 'Bonjour, c'est mon mec' (hello, that's my boyfriend, translated from French), realizing publicly that the two of them were dating the same person3.

A few hours later, @rosejkittenish jumped into the thread saying she was Timothee's ex and had kept sleeping with him after their breakup, a tweet that pulled around 17,000 likes and confirmed the pattern was bigger than two women2.

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How It Spread

On December 25th, 2022, French Twitter turned the mess into infographics. @buksista posted a flowchart of Timothee's overlapping relationships that racked up about 27,000 likes, and @hiitskar posted another version with roughly 21,000 likes45.

The next day, users started riffing on the 'Yumyum' text itself. @win0g compared Timothee to a cat staring at food, hitting close to 7,000 likes in a day6. French politician Sandrine Rousseau even posted a joke tweet about the drama on December 25th, which pulled over 16,400 likes in two days and pushed the story from Twitter subculture toward mainstream French feeds7.

By December 26th, brands were trying to piggyback. @MattAudibert called out Netflix for jumping on the affair and got about 4,000 likes plus a retweet from one of Timothee's exes8. The women at the center of the story asked people to stop harassing them, and 'Yumyum' settled into a French internet shorthand for cringe sexting and messy public dating drama3.

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How to Use This Meme

People typically use 'Yumyum' as a sarcastic tag on a screenshot of a bad flirty text, or drop it under photos to mock a guy's clumsy sexting energy. A common convention is to pair it with a cat-food reaction image, following @win0g's December 26th, 2022 comparison6. French users also invoke 'affaire Timothee' when a new public cheating thread erupts, treating the phrase as a template for messy overlapping-relationship drama3.

Frequently Asked Questions