Hello,
I am a newcomer to this forum and would greatly appreciate receiving some advice.
I'm a Canadian citizen but originally my nationality was Indian because my parents are from there. I never lived in India; I was born and raised in the Middle East until my family immigrated to Canada. My fiancé, who is Indian, was recently denied a visitor visa to come to Canada, which was hugely disappointing as we hoped to get married in August. I have my parents and a lot of siblings here in Canada and they cannot travel to India if we were to do the wedding there. So now we are thinking about doing a simple civil ceremony in India in the next month or so, and would like to postpone the church wedding and big reception until he gets his PR visa and joins me here.
However, I understand that some people think the Delhi office looks more favourably on applications where both a civil and religious ceremony have been conducted, as this is generally what Indian couples do. As I've never lived in India, I'm not very familiar with how things are normally done there. It seems unreasonable to expect couples to do a religious ceremony in India simply to conform to norms, but we'll go ahead and do it if it improves our chances of success in the end.
My fiancé and I have known each other all our lives as we went to the same school in the Middle East. However, once my family immigrated to Canada and his returned to India, we lost touch and only reconnected in Canada in 2008 (he was here on a visitor visa for his cousin's wedding, and all the families know each other well). We started corresponding, and then moved to telephone calls, and I visited him in India in 2009 and earlier in 2011. We took a lot of time to see whether the long distance relationship would last, and finally made the decision to get engaged a few months ago.
Like many of you, we're prepared to do whatever is necessary to ensure his PR application is successful. I'd really appreciate your perspective on whether you think the civil ceremony would suffice to become legally married and launch the PR application, or whether it would look better to the visa officer if we did both the civil and church weddings in India, even though only his family will be there.
Sorry for the lengthy post and thank you in advance!
