Border crossing: Couple's story of love, marriage, immigration

Matt and I met online in Autumn of 2005 on Livejournal, the original personal blogging site. He randomly commented on a picture I posted, and we got to talking. At that point in our lives, we were both university students; I was attending Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and he was attending Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, although he is originally from London, Ontario. We started chatting every day, and made plans to meet when he was coming to Michigan to visit his uncle (who was also my American Sign Language instructor) over the holidays. We hit it off, and decided to take a trip to New York City that year for New Year’s Eve. While there, we decided to start dating and give a long-distance relationship a try. Over the next year, we would travel to visit each other on basically a monthly basis, and we spent the summer away from school together in Michigan. As things progressed nicely, I decided to propose to him, so I came up with an elaborate plan to travel to New York City for our dating anniversary, and ended up proposing to him in the same bar that we started dating at exactly one year earlier.

After the engagement, we continued to date long-distance for another year until I graduated, and then I moved temporarily to Rochester, New York, to live with Matt until he finished his classes five months later. At this point, Matt still had to complete two internships to earn his degree, and I was sick of driving everywhere, so we packed up and moved to Chicago to start the next phase of our lives. Over the following year, Matt finished his internships and graduated, and then ended up staying after his student visa expired.

As far as the immigration process went, it isn’t exactly an affordable process for a single-income family, so we ended up waiting far longer than we originally anticipated to get married and start the process. We are pragmatists in the end, so we gradually cut our plans from a big wedding down to a quick small affair. We helped host an Immigration Equality event, and started looking at options. When John Kerry stated that the Department of State would consider same-sex couples equally for immigration status back in October 2013, we knew it was almost time.

Then, in November when the law changed in Illinois to allow same-sex marriage, even though there was a significant delay, we started saving up and making plans. Thanks to the February 2014 ruling to allow same-sex marriage in Cook county, we planned for a few days and then went down to the courthouse. We went with a couple close friends from our stay in Chicago, and Matt’s sister even drove in on a day’s notice from Indianapolis to attend. It was a small group in a small room for less than 10 minutes, but it finally gave us the opportunity to make progress in our lives.

We then got back in touch with the brilliant Michael Jarecki, the immigration attorney we had been referred to earlier by another couple who had gone through the immigration process, and we finally got started working on the process. We compiled photos and stories of us over the eight years we had been together to prove that we had a real relationship, and 10 months later finally had our interview with the immigration agent, who gave us the thumbs up. Matt finally received his permanent green card last week, and we are now finally, FINALLY done with the process.