My fiancee, who I have been with for two years, is starting to seem not to be the person who I thought she was. In the last few weeks alone, I have caught her in three different lies, all of which are well above the level of "trivial white lie."
I will focus on the most important one here. When we started dating two years ago, she told me right off the bat that she had just a few months prior had her divorce from her ex husband finalized. They had one child together, plus she had a child from a previous man, plus we now have a four month old.
Early on in our relationship, she randomly came to me one day saying that somebody might be logging in to a fake Facebook account in her name and sending me a message to tell me that she and her ex husband were actually still married. I never actually got this supposed message, but still it was really weird. She assured me then that she was, in fact, divorced. But since there are kids involved, we do still have contact with her ex and she receives child support from him.
Then last fall, my mother, who is very family court savvy due to her own experience with my father, told me that she had looked up my fiancee on our state's public records website to find a case that she was trying to offer her some advice on, and she was unable to find a record of their divorce. Now, since my fiancee has had several different last names in the past, I didn't think much of it because I figured the record was just under one of the alternate spellings (lots of names and hyphenation combos for her.) I assured my mother that she was definitely divorced.
Right around this time my fiancee had to go back to court with her ex to dispute some child support arrangements, or at least that's what she told me that the court date was for.
Here's where it gets a lot more suspicious. A couple of weeks ago at one of our custody handoffs (which I handle due to a restraining order she holds against her ex husband) he handed me some court documents and said that these were "the papers that (my fiancee) needed to sign." Figuring they had to do with the ongoing child support case, I didn't pay it too much mind, until when I got home and actually looked at the papers. They were divorce papers, not child support papers. When I showed this to my fiancee, she laughed it off and basically played it like her ex is just an idiot (which, to be fair, he is) and he got the wrong forms from the courthouse. But he had filled in every spot on the forms EXCEPT the child support part. And then the next day, she returned the papers to him, presumably filled out, but I never saw them because she put them in a sealed envelope.
Then last week due to one of the other lies I've discovered recently involving some traffic citations I was lied to about, I personally looked her up on the public records site, to get answers to my questions about the traffic citations. But what I also found was that, not only could I not find a record of a divorce filing from a few years ago, under any of her names, but that there was an OPEN filing for divorce started last October, which is when they went to court and I was told it was a child support hearing. The record on the public website very clearly labels it as a divorce hearing, and the status as Open.
So now I am almost positive that she is in fact legally separated, in order to receive child support payments, but still technically married until the ongoing divorce case is closed. Which means she lied to me for two years about the status of her divorce.
Our relationship hasn't been good for a while, but I still wanted to try and fix it until I found all this out. This, coupled with all the other lies I've discovered lately, makes me lose all my trust for her. And I'm not about to marry somebody I can't trust, who would lie to me like that. The difficulty is that I know she doesn't make enough at her job to support herself, let alone the three kids. Obviously if we split up I will pay child support and fight for shared custody, but I know she's going to probably have to move back in with her parents for a while to make it work, and it's going to be immensely difficult for her to get by. I don't want to do this to her, but I don't want to be stuck in a relationship built on lies either. I don't know what to do. Any help from the community would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.