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…many folks watched the TLC show and followed it weekly to keep up with the drama as it unfolded. Maybe those couples were real, I don’t really know, but the way they framed those stories couldn’t have painted a more skewed (fake) picture of the process and its requirements. Petitioning for your international fiancé is a highly scrutinized process and a pain in the ass–such that if you didn’t really like that person, or weren’t 100% committed to whatever fake story you’ve crafted (if that’s what you’re trying to do, though I wouldn’t try and defraud the gov’t), then it really wouldn’t be worth your time, money, or energy.

I was pretty proud of the job I did cleaning and making space before Efrem got here. I turned my bed around and created two night stands, I moved furniture and cleared space to construct and fit an external closet rack for his clothes, I cleaned top to bottom. Clearly I was deluded to think that was sufficient.

I’ve been making myself nervous to go to the social security office, fearing that they would give us a hard time, not understanding his status and his paperwork. I looked up what I would need on the social security website for a noncitizen, and whether he would be eligible, and when that got a bit confusing, I finally went to our godsend page, Visa Journey.

Throughout our two years of dating and these last 10 months of paperwork to obtain the fiance visa, my parents still had never met Efrem. Sure there was kind of a phone call here, and a skype conversation, there, but Efrem had never come to the US and my parents had never gone to SA. It’s a terribly interesting order of operations: boyfriends/girlfriends usually meet the parents before an engagement occurs, but nothing has been “normal” in this relationship, so why would this be any different.