Selling Your Love Story to a Complete Stranger – From Cape Cod Shores to Coromandel Sands Series – Part 3
I had to apply for three separate visas allowing me to live and work in NZ. The Partner of a New Zealander Work Visa application was the most laborious, as I had to compile mountains of information for it, though that groundwork made the next two visas markedly easier.
Half of the application involves filling in required information, and the other half is open-ended, allowing you to upload whatever you think will add weight to your case. Here’s a taste of what they required:
Work history: my entire work history, dating back as far as I could remember.
Police certificate: an FBI background check from the United States
Genuine and stable partnership evidence: a landlord letter and joint mail
Evidence of funds: my bank account balance
Evidence of financial dependency: proof of our joint account
As for the open-ended part, I threw in everything I could possibly think of: letters of support from friends; four years of WhatsApp messages (in one massive 4,496 page PDF); a Canva photo album tastefully sprinkled with a bit of clip art; proof of our shared Spotify.
Before applying for my first visa, I did a good deal of research into it. By all accounts, the most important piece of any partnership-based visa application is the ‘timeline of your partnership’. Immigration offers little in the way of explaining what they want out of this timeline – they maybe purposely keep it vague so that people who are trying to cheat the system don’t just go down and tick off all the boxes – but everything I managed to find online boiled down to the fact that the partnership timeline is essentially where you get to tell the story of your relationship in your own words. There’s no recommended length or format for this document, but everything I read said the more you tell them, the better.
At the time I applied, about 85% of our relationship had been long-distance, meaning that we had nearly every one of our ‘significant milestones’ in writing, which – I hate to say it – was convenient in terms of having to provide evidence. Mining our four years of beautiful, private conversations for the sole purpose of cherry picking ‘the good stuff’ felt cheap at first, as though in order to prove the genuine depth of this immense love we have, I had to distill our story down to a bunch of juicy sound bites. But rather than seeing it as an invasion of our privacy, I chose to look at it this way: I love telling a good story, and we had a damned good story to tell. If Immigration wanted a little skit, I’d give ‘em an off-Broadway smash.
The first page of our timeline was a simple bulleted list of dates and milestones, in case my application landed on the desk of an ornery, overworked Immigration Officer short on patience and time. As for pages two through seventeen, I wanted it to be the best damned timeline of partnership that person had ever read. I wanted them to be riveted. I wanted them wiping away tears. I wanted them to be laughing out loud in their office (years ago I came across this obscure quote – attributed to a court jester – which I’ve never forgotten: ‘Make them laugh; they’ll have a harder time shooting you’). I wanted them to forward it to their colleagues, to tell their spouse about it over dinner that night. I didn’t just want them to rubber-stamp my visa; I wanted them rooting for us. I wanted them to love our story as much as we loved it.
Whatever I did worked, since that visa, and the two after that, were approved. In the end, I’ll never know if the Immigration Officer assigned to my case was hanging off every word, or just glanced at the first page of bullet points, or if they even opened the time line of partnership at all. Although I do like to imagine them coming across my application at the end of a long day, meaning to just skim it but becoming utterly engrossed in our love story, smiling to themselves, cheering us on. Rooting for us.
Read the first two parts of Hilary’s series here.
Words by Hilary Emerson Lay
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