Hello,
I can share my story. Me and my spouse first met on the internet (2013) and was in a long distance relationship for many years. Over the years, I visited him once and stayed for about 1 month, and he visited me once and stayed for 5 months. We have quite a big gap in age (11 years) and our respective families come from different cultural and religious background as well. When we got married, it was only a small civil ceremony attended by very few friends as we are living in a city far away from both our families and old friends.
When we are going through the spousal sponsorship process, our approach is to stick to what the application requirements asked for. For example, max 20 photographs and not more than that. We take note of what senior people in this forum said, in terms of not making extra work for officer processing our file.
Thanks to this forum, we are mindful that the circumstances surrounding our relationship may raise red flags. To address our worry, in the 'additional document' portion we wrote an explanation letter to highlight our relationship - emphasizing on the things me and my spouse have in common. We hope this would help the officer in understanding our relationship, how is it that we came to be together and in love with each other even though we are two people who originally came from quite polar opposite corners of the world.
Personally I understand the anxiety and the frustration that comes with being in a long distance relationship, and the indescribable anguish that comes with the uncertainty of the immigration process. I hope my story can give hope to genuine loving couples who have been in LDRs and have been waiting to be together for so long. You can check my signature to see our timeline which is still in progress.
Having said that, I don't think it's 'harsh' or 'mean' when people answer these kind of questions with candor. Realistically, if your relationship have red flags, it's so much better to understand up front what your challenges are.
