Thank you so much for replying....thus so helpful thank you !!!! My partner and l have been friends for almost 2 years....it's the last 6 months that has hit us with this thing where we are so connected on such a level l have not experienced and l just won't give up or give into the age madness!! If men can do it...why can't we.....and l certainly did not intend for this.....
But l am the happiest l have ever been.....so yes l will marry my bet friend and love. I will do this in UA !! He will then work there for one year. But meantime l will apply for spousal sponsorship. Since he cannot come home to Toronto with me until this process is completed and hopefully accepted. There have been many obstacles in front of us. But we will not give up....we are both determined to build this life together.
I'm sorry....you are not married yet...so you both met here in Canada. I'm sorry l don't mean to be nosy. But we are so needing guidance from a level of someone who has been through it or are further along then we are! !!! Any more you can offer would be appreciated
I don't know the outcome of our application yet, but so far have not been asked to go for interview. It seems that they are processing people in about 9 - 12 months on average at the Mexico City VO, even for those who applied before Dec 7, 2016. So we are really hopeful it will happen by the end of this year ... although I have learned from this experience that nothing is a sure thing. (We are nearing the 9 month mark).
Regarding what else we did, we did go and seek the advice of an immigration consultant. We did not make the application through her but we got her to review for a fee our package before we sent it off. We actually did not end up using those forms as they were the old application form and we decided to go with the new ones, so we re-did the forms, but her suggestions came in handy.
We spent many months collecting all the info for the documents required. We had the added hassle of having to translate my partner's documents from Spanish into English. Because there were about 7 visits we had over the years to see each other since we cohabited together until the time we applied, we there was a lot of work involved in photocopying passport stamps, travel itineraries/boarding passes and finding pictures to document these visits. I think this was really difficult as we had been apart 3.5 years and we had so many pictures and countless communications through WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype and emails to go through as well as phone logs through WhatsApp.
Try to send them a variety of communications. I think we may have even sent them a text when we were having a disagreement. Pictures we sent showed proof of where we went together (mostly vacations we would see each other). We also included pictures where we were with family and friends and one with my son who we will live with to round out the 20 photos required.
We did include letters we each wrote explaining our relationship and how we met and how our age difference was not a significant factor in our relationship. We were told by the immigration consultant to write these letters even though there is no mention of needing them even in the old application. However, since we had already written them, we decided to still submit them in the new application we sent. I don't know if they even read them, however. We also got 3 friends to write us letters of support but we did not get these notarized. So far they have not asked us to do so.
I'm not sure what other advice I can give you. Just provide proof that will give evidence of as many aspects of your relationship as you can and provide a picture for them to see how it evolved from the beginning to the stage you are at now. That is what we tried to do so that they can see our relationship is enduring and therefore genuine.
I do believe that the evidence for common-law couples is slightly different from married ones. They seem to ask for more evidence, however I think it acted in our favour as it shows we have our affairs more interdependent.
We did not want to get married at this stage for a number of reasons, including the fact that I had just gotten divorced and I am not quite ready to go down the marriage road again. In time, we may explore the possibility of marriage, but hopefully we can be together first and do it when the time is right.
Before that we did as