Imagine you are in the pub on a Friday night, and you have just met your ideal partner. You instantly fall head over heels in love with each other, and immediately start making plans to spend the rest of your lives together. Now, imagine that in order to do this, you must send off a whole stack of paperwork, wait for a reply, send off a whole other stack of paperwork stating your intent to be together, wait for ten months for another reply, have a full medical exam with blood test, provide in-depth personal details, financial details, a police records check, every job you have ever had since you were old enough to work, enough ID to get you through the toughest middle eastern border, and pay nearly $2000 dollars for the privilege of doing all this, just to find out if you can proceed with your new found relationship in a ten minute snap decision interview?
This is the K1 fiancee visa process. And this is just to get into the USA.
Wren and I were finally married on the 25th of February 2010, at seven o’clock pm, at Chapel Dulcinea in Hayes County, Texas, after a three year relationship of emails, letters, online chats, long distance phone calls, 3 meetings and a total of 3 months and 3 weeks in each other’s actual company. I finally received my green card and full permanent resident status in early August of the same year. Throughout the process, both Wren and I have repeatedly said, we should be writing this whole crazy experience down. I mean, the whole thing, from start to finish makes a great story, and anyone who has gone through the immigration/emigration process will surely be nodding and smiling knowingly right now. It is such a detailed, complicated and time consuming process, almost laughable in places. Almost. (“We’ll laugh about all this one day!”, we would say to each other.. Well, as of 8/20/2010, its not that day yet. Perhaps next week.)
So, I am going to attempt to recall the process from first encounter, to green card day the best I can, and hopefully provide some support and answers to anyone else who is marrying a foreigner, and some entertainment and insight to anyone who is reading, or just plain curious.
A Brief History….
Wren and I met in 2006 on MySpace, in a chance encounter, and met for real at Heathrow airport, terminal 4, in October 2007.
In March, 2006, I moved to London from Thirsk, North Yorkshire, after separating from my ex wife, and finally giving up as a pub landlord. I arrived in London with no plan, no job, but at least I had a little cash, a place to live, and wireless broadband. There was no doubt, I was fed up though. I was reeling from the breakup of my marriage (although we did remain friends, thankfully), the failure of my business, and the subsequent debt and looming bankruptcy this had left me with. So, I did what any self respecting 29 year old would do, and brushed it all under a big rug, and ignored the problem for as long as I could get away with, and for a little longer than I could not, and went down the pub instead. I was looking for work, (a surpisingly difficult task for an ex bar manager and cook in London in 2005), and after two months, I took a job as one of those annoyingly upbeat and whacky people who come up to you on the street, giving ‘free hugs’, say “wow, cool, groovy” a lot, then try to get you to sign up for whatever charity it is they are working for that week. I didn’t really mind… It would get me out of the house, in the fresh air, and a half decent wage for as long as I could stand it. The trouble is, I am such a terrible salesperson, on account of not being able to put on the whole ‘wacky, bubbly , cool, groovy, hey, wow’ persona that such a job entails. The pub lunches were good though. I lasted a month. I spent another couple of months on the dole, walking around London, armed with a stack of C.V’s looking for work. During this time, I composed a lot of music on my laptop, and promoted this on a MySpace account under the name Mr. Bear. MySpace was all the rage, and was a great platform for any musician, or social networking addict, such as myself. I wanted as many people as possible to hear my music, and built up a large collection of virtual ‘friends’. Most of these ‘friends’ were added purely because they popped up when I signed in. An American lady going under the name Gypsywren was one of these folk. I thought nothing of it when I requested her, and went about my business of pestering more folk to listen to my noise. The next time I signed in, there was a message from Gypsywren saying something along the lines of ‘Hello there! Who the devil are you then?’ So, I replied, she replied back, I did the same, and so did she. Before you could say the name of that Welsh train station, we had begun a friendship through MySpace, and daily emails. A most welcome diversion from being unemployed, skint, and none too pleased with London life. Come November, I had moved back to Thirsk, and Wren and I had started writing actual handwritten letters to each other, thus establishing us as bona-fide pen pals, a rare thing, considering the technological leaps and bounds in the methods of communication that so many people use to not bother keeping in touch with each other. I moved to Northallerton, into a spare room at my grandparents house, and worked in the family fish and chip shop for the next two years. It was the perfect place to hide away, recover from the hangover of having a pub and living in London, a place where I could write a whole bunch of music, and work out what my next move was going to be. Gypsywren had become just Wren, and we continued our correspondence, this time having moved onto the wonders of Yahoo chat. It was good for us to be a constant for each other, to have this friendship, and just to have someone to natter to whenever we needed to, or wanted to. We made each other laugh, we shared our daily stories, we sent photo’s, we shared music, and we got to know each other in the way that only two people who have never met, or spoken to each other, but are in constant contact can.
To be continued……
No comments:
Post a Comment