Critical Dos and Don’ts of Marrying Your Foreign Fiance

A few things you need to know if you are submitting your K1 Fiance Visa without the aid of an attorney.

An important requirement that you must comply with before submitting. You must have met your fiance within two years of submitting the application. If you met your fiance say three years ago and wanted to file, it is not a good idea. You will need to take another trip to see her and update your current travel documents before submitting.

These trips prove certain things to the USCIS officers. They prove your on-going relationship. The officers tend to not trust long distance relationships that do not show a current face to face meeting within the last two years. To them the relationship is not normal. If you have not seen your fiance within the last two years, then something looks definitely wrong to them. This will be something that would have an immediate negative impact on your submittal and will most likely lead to your application not being approved.

See your fiance twice within this two year period. Once is good, but it really does not show a trend. Usually meeting only once does not show that your intentions are true. This is just my personal opinion but a lot can happen over three years of not seeing each other. That bond that you had with her, may not be there once you are ready to file. Best to keep that bond strong with meetings every 6 months and at the least once a year. But ultimately that decision is up to you or both of you.

Some K1 Fiance couples are just not compatible. There were a few I met that had this problem of trying to get to know each other once they were together in the USA. Trust me, it is not an easy thing to do and most marriages like this end up in divorce. For the couples I talked to, it was even hard for them to just sleep in the same bed.

Meeting my fiance every 4 – 6 months was very important to me. I would usually plan some very nice trip that would last three weeks. The first meeting was a little strange. The second trip was better. The third trip together was when I knew that deep down she was the right person for me. These trips are hard on the person that has to travel all those hours by plane, yet it pays off a hundred times over when she is here in the USA with you. You will appreciate all the efforts you took to keep that bond strong.

Take a trip to see your fiance regularly. Spend time with her. Here are a few things you must consider when on your trips. Keep all plane ticket stubs, hotel receipts and currency exchange receipts.

These are the items I collected from my travels. I kept plane ticket stubs, hotel receipts, currency exchange receipts, and retail shop receipts. I would buy her things while I was with her, so the retail receipts worked great. These receipts would usually have the name of the store, date and its address.

Taking a lot of pictures is something I did on all my travels with my fiance. I would also make it a point to take pictures of us together. These pictures would always have the date and time stamp on them. I would have two pictures of us from every trip I took with her. I attached all these pictures to my K1 Visa Application.