Six of the worst breakup excuses

In a perfect world, breakups would be easy and the reasons straight-forward — we just do not feel the same about each other anymore or this relationship is not building either of us.

In reality, breaking up is hard to do and in a bid to lessen the blow, breakup lines end up being coated in lies, apologies, and flattery. You must have heard the overused, “It’s not you, it’s me”, or “You deserve better than me.”

Turns out that these two are not the worst reasons out there given for love gone sour. Six men and women share the most ridiculous reasons they gave in a bid to get out of a relationship or the flimsiest breakup excuses they have heard from former partners.

I’m dying

Linda, a 27-year-old journalist, admits to feeling a little guilty each time she thinks about how she lied that she was terminally ill to get out of a relationship.

The man in question, she says, was fun to be with but he was three years younger, which was a problem for Linda. Also, she was not ready for a committed relationship at the time.

“First, I told him that I had been transferred from Nairobi to work in another town, but this didn’t seem to deter him, so I told him that I had terminal cancer.

Knowing him, I knew he would have wanted to walk the journey with me, so I told him I didn’t want to take him through that because I didn’t want him to remember me like that,” she says.

This was three years ago. She has met the man a couple of times since and she could barely look at him. Sometimes she wonders whether her being still single is nature’s way of paying her back.

You look too much like my sister

After a year of fun and passion, Victoria’s boyfriend decided that she looked too much like his sister for him to date her comfortably. And this was just a few hours after she had lost her virginity to him.

“I trashed his house. I was angry, I felt trivialised. Was he trying to say that he had never really looked at me for a year?” she asks.

This happened seven years ago, but this 28-year-old has not forgiven her ex-boyfriend for his cruelty.

He had many options out of their relationship. He could have told her he had fallen out of love with her, he could have slowly cut her out of his life, but he opted to give a reason which only stirred up bitterness.

I’m in the NIS

“He came up to me one morning while I was ironing his shirt for work and told me that he needed to tell me something very important.

He sat me on the bed and told me that he was an agent of the National Intelligence Service and that he needed to go away on a mission indefinitely,” Njeri, 26, recalls

Before she could start asking questions, he added that she would not understand and so he was not going to explain, and with that walked out of her house and her life.

She found out after only a couple of weeks that not only was he still working at the debt collection agency where she met him, he was also married.

“I felt insulted. I wish he had given me a more intelligent excuse,” she says.

I’m getting married

Two years into a seemingly happy and functioning relationship, Hanna’s boyfriend sent her a text message telling her that he was getting married. Seeing as their relationship was going so well, she thought it was a joke and called him to confirm.

“For a fleeting second, I even thought he was trying to propose to me,” the 29-year-old paediatric nurse at a city hospital recalls.

Throughout the relationship, she had not even suspected that he was seeing another person besides her. How could she have missed such a big red flag? How could he have been planning a wedding when he spent every waking moment with her? When she demanded an explanation, he gave her the most absurd one.

“That he had a lost a bet he’d taken with a female friend and now he had to marry her to honour the bet. Six months in, I’m still waiting for that marriage to materialise,” she says.

God wants better for you

Josh, a 26-year-old marketer, shares the most baffling breakup reason he has ever been given. This girl, he says, is the best-looking he has ever dated.

“We had been together eight months when she took me out to a nice lunch.

After lunch, she started telling me about how she had been speaking to God about our relationship, which I found to be odd as I didn’t know her as a religious person,” he says.

Apparently, God was not happy with their relationship, not because Josh was not good enough for her, but because He had a better plan for Josh.

“When someone hides behind religion, it becomes very difficult to question a breakup. I, however, knew that I had been played when I saw her in a club looking very snug in the arms of a man that she once introduced as a friend barely a month later.”

The only other breakup excuse that comes close for Josh is a woman who dumped him for allowing her to go on a week-long trip to Mombasa with her girlfriends, claiming that he did not care enough to get angry or to stop her.

I’m going to rehab

Eustas, a 32-year-old real estate agent was shocked when a woman he had been seeing for a little over a year announced that she was checking into a rehab facility for sexual addiction.

“I was shocked. I mean, couldn’t there have been signs had she been suffering from that kind of addiction?”

Alarm bells started ringing when she insisted on breaking up, saying that after a three-month stint in rehab, she would still need to be celibate for a further six months.

To ensure full recovery, her therapist had advised her to cut any romantic ties.

His suspicions were confirmed when, despite claiming to be lying low, the woman’s social media activities went on.

“The breakup would have been easier without knowing that I’d been lied to,” he says.