I have one! I have one! Me!
Hubby and I received CoPR nearly 3 weeks ago.
We met online in early March of 2012 and started actively dating in April of the same year. We spent every second day if not every day together. My husband - at the time, boyfriend - had already been living, studying and working in Canada for the past five years on student visas, work visas etc. We'd been dating for a five months when he confessed to me that he had been planning on moving to another province before we'd met. He was cautious about it but since things were going so well between us that he asked me to move with him, so we did. We'd been together a full 9 months, before he proposed. We told my parents, we told his parents and they both got really excited... and then everything got really
really out of hand. Hubby and I already knew that he had another year left on his work visa, so our original plan was to plan the wedding, get married and then apply to get the whole PR issue worked out.
The problem is, when two families from different cultural backgrounds start planning separate weddings and you have no say in what goes on. We'd been engaged for a few months and decided one night that we were just going to tell our parents that we were getting married on our own and then we could have time to just be a married couple before all of the ceremonies and the crazy family expectations. So we invited a few friends and we got married without our parents. Instead of waiting to get PR status until we were married in front of our families, we decided to get it out of the way, that way it wouldn't be a stress over long-term.
This ended up being a really big stress factor for me while we were applying for PR anyway. We had a ceremony, we had a mini party afterwards, we had a professional photographer, a big white dress - the whole deal. But no parents. My parents wrote a letter explaining it and two of my friends wrote letters as well, one friend who was there and another who couldn't make it. Both of whom had met my hubby on many occasions. I never changed my last name - I wanted and still want that to be something special left for the ceremonies we have with family, here and abroad. We didn't file with CRA until this filing that we were married in January of 2013. While we don't share a name yet, hubby and I do share an apartment lease, a car lease, joint bank accounts and insurance policies. We have photos out the wazoo and tickets for dates, trips and oodles of text messages.
The dates are below, but we sent our application March 27th and it arrived April 1st 2013, we received AOR on April 16th. We waited until about 8 months into our application being with CIC to send them a small "update" package - this included our purchase of a car, more vacation pictures and pictures of us with our family - his side and mine. My thinking behind this was that we wanted to show that we were still living together and maintaining a healthy marriage while waiting for the process to be done. A month later, we received AIP on January 23rd. DM followed shortly after on Feb 20th and hubby became a landed PR on March 12th!
In summary:
* Hubby and I have 3 years between us age wise.
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Hubby is considered a member of the Islamic faith even though he is non-practicing and I am "catholic" even though I am non-practicing as well.
* His family knew of me and liked me/my family knew of him and liked him.
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We'd been dating and engaged a short time before we were married.
* We spent a lot of time together before the proposal/marriage and we came to have mutual friends
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Our parents were not present at the wedding.
* We both have multiple post-secondary degrees/diplomas/bachelors.
* We are both part of the same social/economic class.
* We share insurance policies, leases, bank accounts, have pets, etc.
Our application included:
* Over 200 pages of text messages from our dating history
* Proof of dates/outings with receipts, bank statements etc.
* Wedding photos, wedding certificate, wedding invitations, wedding cards and thank you cards
* Plane tickets, vacation photos etc.
* Phone records - I'm lucky hubby was such a chatter box, he called and we spoke nearly every night for hours before we lived together
* A relationship timeline - this was just a spreadsheet that outlined how our relationship developed and what we planned to do in the future.
I think we had to tell our story and if it required an interview, I would tell it again. I was confident in our relationship and our marriage and that's what got us through in the end.
