Guys Reveal The Most Ridiculous Excuses They’ve Given For Cheating On Their Girlfriends

It goes without saying that when you’re in a committed relationship with someone, you don’t sleep with other people. However, when you do mess up and are unfaithful to your partner, you should at least have the decency to tell your partner what you did and be honest about the circumstances so that they can drop you like a bad habit. Lying about it is not only unbelievable, it just digs the hole you’re in even deeper. We talked to guys who, because they could be anonymous, agreed to share some of the most ridiculous excuses they gave former girlfriends for cheating. Prepare yourself — there are some real doozies on here.

1. He must have been sleepwalking. “I know it sounds dumb, but I legitimately tried this one with my ex,” 27-year-old Zach admits. He was on a business trip when he slept with his female colleague who was staying a few rooms down from him at the hotel. When the truth came out, he scrambled to come up with excuses for his cheating. “I said I’d taken Ambien and I must have gone wandering down the hall and had sex with her in my sleep and didn’t realize until the next morning when I woke up next to her. She dumped my ass that day.”
2. He was trying to boost the other woman’s self-esteem. Now this one is pretty special. When Matty, 24, hooked up with his ex-girlfriend from college, he immediately started racking his brain for good excuses that would explain his cheating. What he came up with was something else. “I told my girlfriend that my ex was really upset because she’d been broken up with and he’d told her that no one else would ever want to sleep with her again. I didn’t want her to feel bad, so I did it as a one-off to boost her confidence. Yes, really.”
3. He didn’t know what “monogamous” really meant. AJ, 26, was a freshman in college when he tried this gem on his girlfriend. “We just decided to be exclusive about a week or so before and I really liked her, but I also really wanted to hook up with this girl in my English Lit lecture. I knew if it was going to work, I was gonna have to come out and tell her myself what happened. I said I’d slept with someone the previous weekend but assumed it was cool since we were monogamous. I knew what it meant, but I told her I thought it was about only sleeping with one person at a time, like that she’d never have a threesome. Even worse, she actually believed me and we stayed together for a few more months.”
4. He needed to be sure how he felt. “My buddy at the time told me to try this one — he insisted it was one of the best excuses for cheating ever,” shares 26-year-old Patel. “I just told her I had to sleep with someone else to be sure that the feelings I had for her were real and I wasn’t kidding myself. What’s worse is that I was actually shocked when she didn’t buy it and dumped me instead.”
5. It was his birthday. You have to hand it to 29-year-old Davey, who legitimately insisted that he had one of the most infallible cheating excuses ever: he did it on his birthday. “I was only 20 at the time, to be fair, and I was a bit of a d–khead. I knew I didn’t have a free pass just because it was my birthday, but I sure as hell insisted to my girlfriend that I did. She disagreed and dumped my a– pretty quickly,” he recalls.

1. He lost a bet with his friends. Sometimes you hear something so dumb, it’s almost impossible to believe it could be real. This is one of them. Michael, 25, told his girlfriend at the time that he had no choice but to cheat on her because he’d lost a bet with his friends and that was his way of “paying up.” Not only does that make him a jerk, but it doesn’t paint his friends in too great of light, either. “I didn’t know what else to say, man!” Michael says of his terrible decision.
2. He thought it was “just what guys do.” While women are just as capable as men of having affairs, it does seem to be that men struggle with fidelity more than women. That’s why 21-year-old Preston thought it was just a normal thing to have sex with other women while in a relationship. “As far as excuses go, I knew I wasn’t going to get away with cheating on her with this one, but I still tried it. Part of me thinks I even believed it when I said it.”
3. He was on a business trip in another state, so it didn’t count. Was 32-year-old Scott serious with this one? It seems so. In his defense, he wants to point out that he used this one about seven years ago and he’s a changed man these days. “I told her that since we lived in New York but I cheated in Florida, it shouldn’t count. I don’t know, it just seemed right.” Did his girlfriend at the time buy it? “F–k no!”
4. He wanted to prove he was “different.” Now if you want to hear one of the most backward excuses for cheating you’ll ever come across in your life, Paddy, 26, has one for you. “She told me her last boyfriend was pretty much obsessed with her and was so perfect that she got bored with him in the end and broke up with him,” he says. “I guess I thought cheating on her would make me ‘exciting’ and keep the passion alive in our relationship, and at first I thought it would work… until she cheated on me two months later and I couldn’t handle it.” Wow.
5. He was being blackmailed. Marcus, 30, laughs as he tells this story, likely realizing that his cheating excuses were so far-fetched that only an idiot would believe them. Four years ago, he told his girlfriend that he had to sleep with another woman because she was blackmailing him. How, you ask? “I told my girl that this woman threatened to tell her I was cheating on her to ruin our relationship if I didn’t sleep with her,” he explains. “So I figured I might as well because she was gonna tell my girl that I’d done it anyway.” A for effort, I suppose?