Hi BeShoo,
I'll briefly explain my circumstances. They are not quite the same as my partner and I are heterosexual, but we share trying to go the conjugal partner route in common. Last year we tried to apply under conjugal partner, because we could not meet common law for what we felt were compelling reasons, and I was only legally separted, so able to live with someone common-law but still in the waiting period before final divorce to be able to legally marry.
Long story short, none of our reasons were acceptable. I was approved to sponsor him by CPC-M, but we got turned down by Buffalo. They accepted that we could not legally marry (you may also be ok here if Pennsylvania is not a state that recognizes same sex marriage, but they may question, why not get married in Canada) but did not accept that any of our reasons were valid enough to support not meeting the common-law definition. (You may have the same problem here). This added a good 15 months to the process, and we of course lost the fees paid. I won't go into the heartbreak part, I'm sure everyone on this site can relate to that one. We are now married and have submitted a new application as of April 15 under spousal. My experience plus others I have read leads me to believe that it is "next to impossible" to get approved under conjugal, particularly from a reciprocal country such as the U.S., and if it doesn't work, adds alot of extra stress and financial burden to an already difficult siutation. Another member, however, was successful with conjugal (AllisonVSC), I believe, she may be able to shed some light on how to deal with the compelling evidence for conjual, if you still want to pursue that route.
For myself, in retrospect, I would have not tried conjugal and gone the marriage route the first time, if I was starting all over again.
Hope this helps on some level. Good luck whatever you decide to do.
