One time a former wife told me that her friend was just that and he meant nothing to her and all the letters I had found were from him and she did not feel the same way. Based on that I let her go halfway around the world to be with her sick mother and take our daughter. In the end I found this was all planned. Unfortunately, it was my daughter that suffered the most. BTW way she and her entire family are evangelical Christians.
However, don't let this discourage you in the future. To do so would only hurt you. There are still lots of honest people out there.

Yep re my ex and her drinking problem...when you put all your trust in someone and they lie of course it hurts. Devastated? No. Need to move on but it reduces the chances of trusting someone again.

Yeah, my last relationship lol

I'll help, I'll be there for you. Fucking bullshit. I will never trust anyone, including me, again.

Sure have... Now I'm divorced partly because of it...

We discover many lies told us along the way through life. The devastating ones are so in relation to the personal 'belief investment' we've made in them and the consequent things we have done for ourselves and worse yet, TO others because of those lies.

Precisely because coming to know truth can be painful, and devastating to our security in so many ways, we are most often loathe to know the full truth about anything. Having beliefs and attached obligations and actions based on them suddenly erased is extremely traumatic and disorienting!

Consider the best example I know of. A woman has been programmed from earliest memory to become a ward/dependent of her husband. Promises and tokens of promises from a man who is often conditioned himself to shirk true morality (boys will be boys) with biased, assigned gender based excuses lies (sometimes believing his own lies) to her as a means of forming a family. Her entire physical sustenance and financial security is tied to that - dubious business deal.

After some time, sometimes only in months, she starts 'feeling' as though something isn't quite comfortable. His habits start to become mysterious. The brain function in her 'gut' is flagging things that are inconsistent. Suspicion, perhaps not even on a conscious level, begins to form. Fear of possibilities for her alone or alone with children start to also creep into her thoughts. He lies, makes excuses and she dutifully accepts them on the surface while alarms are blazing in the pit of her stomach. Fear increases at the prospect of naked, unprepared independence!

At base, she doesn't WANT to know. Knowing calls upon one to take action and her field of options for action is barren; save possible marginal support from family or friends.

Fear of truth isn't isolated to my example but the description exemplifies the fear of freedom; fear of asserting personal, independent positions in the face of 'having been had'.

We in this congregation of god rejectors have experienced such emotions and recriminations as part of our own escapes from doctrinal fabrications of sheer fantasy and intentional falsehoods. Some of us have escaped those sophisticated articulations of religious lies, only to cling desperately to equally parasitic and grossly false political ideologies, parties and movements; equally ignorant, spoon-fed attitudes as price for membership as a 'true' Conservative, Liberal, Progressive, Socialist et al...

The truth does in fact set one free! The terror invoking question is: Are you prepared for freedom or dependent upon the lies for your emotional and financial 'security'?

Of course. It's always worse when you know it's a lie from the very beginning and know exactly why the other person is lying but he/she won't admit to the real reason.

Does cause my poetic juices to stir, well at least it is some reaction anyway.

I think betrayal lies at the heart of it. Good old Dante put betrayers in the lowest circle of Hell.

Yes I have been destroyed by erroneous reveals. I'm too, especially in a professional workplace, nice to adequately defend myself. Long story long I moved to a new city, bought a pricey home, lost my girl and my job. Keep fighting.