How to Act in Love

As part of Martin’s green card process, we were required to attend an interview with immigration to prove we were not committing marriage fraud.  And as part of our legal fees, we had a pre-interview meeting with our lawyer to prepare us for the occasion.  After four years of being together, Martin and I took the process lightly and joked that the pre-meeting was to teach us how to act in love.  In hindsight, we apparently needed all the help we could get; let’s just say our lawyer was less than impressed.  The pre-meeting went as follows:

Question One: Do you have any financial evidence of your shared life together?  Easy enough, we have a shared bank account, shared health insurance, he is the named beneficiary on my life insurance policy and we live together…apparently that was not enough.  We should have shared bills, lease agreements, credit cards and car insurance.  Okay, Strike One.

Question Two: Do you have any photos together? Not a problem, we have four years of photos including vacations, family outings and hard bound leather books of our lives.  But afraid immigration would keep them, we only brought photo copies of a handful of photos (granted, we made sure to span the four years including different seasons, different haircuts, different clothing styles and different weight-fluctuations).  Apparently photo copies are not indicators of love.  Strike Two.

Question Three: Please answer some basic questions about each other such as “Lisa, when is Martin’s birthday” (October 8) and “what did you do for it this year” (blank stare…I have no idea); “Martin, when is Lisa’s birthday” (September 6) and “what did you do to celebrate” (me; blank stare…we in fact got engaged on my birthday), “Martin, when is your anniversary” (another blank stare, followed by a nervous laugh…) “when was the last time you went out together” (we both look at each other and really laugh because we have no idea).  To be fair we have been together for four years and birthdays, anniversaries or even going out aren’t that big of a deal to us.  Regardless, Strike Three.

At this point, I think our lawyer was getting more nervous about the validity of our relationship and indicated that if we don’t remember these basic things we will most likely be separated for individual questioning (such as what type of toothpaste does your fiancé use…which is one question we actually knew the answer to). 

Our meeting with the lawyer lasted 30 minutes and we spent the following week peppering each other with the same basic questions to ensure we wouldn’t fail when it really mattered.   

When the big day arrived, we woke up early and got to the office one hour ahead of schedule…the only other couple there that early was another American, German relationship (not a surprise).  We waited an hour until our allotted time and met with the agent for a total of 10 minutes during which 8 were spent with basic paperwork.  We were only asked one question and it was how we met, which we nailed!  Either our lawyer over prepared us, or the immigration officer could just tell that we actually are in love with each other.  Which is a good thing; if the US doesn’t think we like each other, we would have had bigger problems than just getting a green card.

Last hurdled has been cleared!  Fingers crossed the paper work is completed soon.