Is Your Ex Making Excuses?

After a breakup, it’s very common for an ex to lie and hide their true motivations.

I want to explain why your ex has probably been making excuses about your breakup and why you can’t be together.

I’ll show you how to determine if your ex is telling the truth, what their excuses REALLY mean, and what to do in order to overcome those excuses that your ex has been giving you.

Common Excuses Your Ex May Tell You

Before we begin, let me give you a few examples of what I mean when I say “excuses”…

First, there’s the classic “I just need some time alone to think” or “I need space to figure out what I want” excuse… your ex might say this when breaking up and try to use it as the main justification for their decision to break up.

Along the same lines, your ex might say things like, “I’m just not ready for a relationship right now” or “I’m feeling overwhelmed and I don’t think I’m in the right headspace to be dating anyone”.

Or they could have used things like work, school, or schedules as the excuse… maybe they said, “I love you but I don’t have time to focus on both my schoolwork and a relationship right now” or “it’s not fair to you if we stay together because I’m always traveling for work and we don’t get to see each other enough”…. Things like that.

Similarly, maybe your ex used parents or religion as their excuse. “I’m sorry, I want to be with you, but it just won’t work because of my family” is a common one… or maybe it was more like, “we’re just from two different worlds, my parents would never let me date anyone with a different religion”…

Or, I often hear things like, “we’re just too different to make this work in the long term”… or “maybe we can be together down the road but it’s just not working right now”.

The common theme among all of these examples I’ve just provided is that they’re all “justifications” for why your ex felt the need to break up, or at least put your relationship on hold. They are concrete, practical excuses to explain why they had to make the difficult decision to break up, even though — as your ex will usually make it sound — they still have strong feelings for you.

Is Your Ex Telling The Truth?

First of all, let’s address one big question: is your ex being honest when they use these kinds of excuses or justifications for breaking up? Or are they lying and trying to use excuses to try and avoid talking about the REAL reasons?

The answer is usually both. There’s almost always an element of truth to whatever excuses your ex will give you for the breakup or for not wanting to get back together.

For example, if your ex is using the “I’m just too busy with my work and school schedule to see you regularly” excuse… it’s probably true that they are busy, and that finding time to meet up and hang out with you regularly would be a challenge due to their schedule.

But let’s be honest here guys… that’s also very obviously not the ONLY reason they want to break up.

It may be a small part of the reason… it might actually be a major reason… but it’s almost never the ONLY reason they’ve decided to end your relationship.

As much as it may be partially true, it’s also likely just a convenient excuse to avoid telling you the full truth or to avoid hurting your feelings.

So, your ex is probably being somewhat truthful, but also almost certainly hiding other reasons or justifications that they don’t want to share with you. Or, in a lot of cases, your ex may not even fully KNOW what the other reasons are… they may simply have fallen out of love, lost that attraction and that “spark” that made your relationship special in the early days…. And they don’t know exactly what caused their feelings to fade, but they also want to avoid hurting you… so they come up with a logical-sounding excuse like “I’m just too busy right now”.

I’ve been a breakup coach for over 13 years now, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of clients in situations like yours… and I can confidently say that whatever excuse your ex gave you for the breakup — whether it was about disapproving parents, long-distance issues, being too busy — is almost certainly not the full story. They’re hiding the other reasons for their decision to break up or to stay broken up for one reason or another.

WHY Your Ex Is Probably Making Excuses

So, at this point, we’ve determined that your ex is hiding at least part of the real reason for your breakup. We know they’re maybe being partly honest with whatever excuses they’ve given you, but they’re also hiding the full story for some reason. Why, exactly, would your ex not just be honest with you? Why the excuses?

Great question, so glad you asked. There are several reasons why your ex might hide things from you when they’re explaining why they want to break up or why they don’t think you should get back together.

Reason #1: They don’t want to hurt you.

This is the most common reason, and it’s also the most wholesome… maybe your ex just fell out of love with you, maybe you shaved your head and got a huge tattoo on your skull and now they think you’re ugly…. Whatever it is, they simply fear that telling you the truth will cause you unnecessary heartache.

By making up an excuse, like “I’m just not ready for a serious relationship” or “we live too far apart to make this work”…. They’ve at least given you SOME kind of justification, but avoided telling you anything that would really hurt your feelings and crush your self-esteem.

Reason #2: They’re feeling guilty about something.

Unfortunately, this one is also pretty common… your ex might come up with an excuse because they want to hide something nasty. Like, for instance, they’ve found someone new.

They want to be with someone else, but they know they shouldn’t tell you that… not only because it will obviously be awful for you to hear the truth–nobody likes being cheated on or dumped for someone else–but also because it will make them look bad to everyone around them.

So, to avoid hurting their image or your feelings, they hide the truth and come up with a reasonable sounding excuse to justify the breakup.

Reason #3: They don’t actually know the real reason.

Like I said earlier, this is very very normal as well… many people just know they want out of a relationship, they’re not feeling the connection or the romantic spark anymore… your ex may feel stuck in a rut or just generally unsatisfied with the relationship… but they worry that simply saying that won’t satisfy you.

They know you’ll want to know WHY they’ve decided to end things, and they’ll pick an excuse that sounds logical to give you some kind of explanation and closure.

Reason #4: They’re infected with “Grass is Greener Syndrome”.

You know the expression… the grass is always greener on the other side. In other words, some people are just never satisfied, and always try to change things up in their life to chase after those greener pastures.

You probably know people like this in your life: the kind of people who have a new best friend every six months, who are often moving to new cities because they think they’ll be happier there, who change jobs regularly chasing some unattainable fantasy of a ‘perfect’ career.

Exes can be like that too. They can suffer from “Grass is Greener” tendencies in relationships… meaning they’ll usually quickly get tired of their romantic relationships because they always think there’s someone better out there.

RELATED: Why Your Ex Can’t Make Up Their Mind

Often this is a phase or something that people grow out of eventually, but some people genuinely just spend years going from one relationship to another, always dreaming and expecting the next one to fulfill their fantasy dreams and finally satisfy them the way they’re hoping.

So, it’s possible your ex is just chasing after a shiny new object or person thinking it’ll finally make them happy… and they’ve given you an excuse to avoid looking flaky or hurt your feelings.

Reason #5: They’re telling the truth.

OK, this isn’t exactly a reason why your ex would lie about the reasons for your breakup…. And like I said, the vast majority of exes WILL only share part of the truth… but once in a while, and especially with older and more mature people with plenty of life experience… your ex COULD be telling the truth. They may not be making excuses.

To be honest, for 90% or more of you, this probably isn’t the case… your ex probably is making excuses and hiding at least part of the truth about their decision to break up… but there is always a slim chance they might be telling the full truth.

What To Do About Your Ex’s Excuses

Alright, let’s finish by talking about what all of this means for you if you’re hoping for another chance with your ex. You know they’re probably not being fully honest, or hiding part of the real reason… or at the very least, they don’t actually know the real reason themselves, so they’ve come up with excuses to satisfy your need for an explanation.

What should you do about this?

How does knowing this affect your strategy to get them back?

Quite honestly, it doesn’t… other than the fact that you now know you shouldn’t be overly focused on whatever excuses they gave you for the breakup. Don’t spend all your time worrying about changing your work and school schedule just to accommodate your ex because he or she told you that they were too busy for the relationship to work.

The truth is, not only will doing so make you look clingy and pathetic by re-arranging your entire daily schedule just to try and convince your ex to take you back…. it also doesn’t fix any other issues that your ex hasn’t told you about. Making more time to see your ex, in this example, likely won’t be enough to make them take you back… and it certainly won’t address their underlying lack of attraction, the loss of that “spark” in your relationship”…. And so on.

RELATED: 15 Signs Your Ex Will Come Back After A Breakup

Basically the moral here is that you shouldn’t be overly fixated on the excuses your ex gave you for the breakup. Most of the time, they’re just that — excuses. They usually have an element of truth to them, but rarely can you actually address and fix that problem and expect it to change your ex’s mind and decide to take you back.

Instead, you should focus on the real strategies that are proven to make your ex want you back: applying a period of No Contact, re-building real organic attraction, romantic and sexual chemistry… using mystery and intrigue and maybe even a bit of jealousy to get them to start chasing you… and basically just making your ex change their subconscious perception of you, to the point where they no longer need to make excuses and start regretting the breakup to the point where they break down and ask you to take them back.

Please, if you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: your ex isn’t telling you the full truth. They’re probably making excuses to some extent. But all that means for you is that you need to remember not to focus too much on those excuses or justifications… and instead, stick to the proven strategies that will overcome those excuses and force your ex to take you back in the long run.

Brad Browning

Brad Browning is widely regarded as the world's most trusted breakup experts, boasting over 12 years of experience working with clients from around the world. Brad's #1 best-selling breakup reversal guide, The Ex Factor, has helped more than 130,000 people from 131 countries to re-unite with an ex. Brad is also the author of Mend The Marriage, a comprehensive self-help guide that teaches married couples how to save their dying marriage and prevent divorce. Brad’s YouTube channel has over 400,000 subscribers and 50 million views, and he has been featured in a number of well-known media outlets and industry journals.