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How does one prove love? Or more specifically, how do you prove to a complete stranger that you and your spouse are in love...using only paper documents?

Creating this "evidence" to prove your marriage is real is what bi-national couples like us have to do just to live in the same country. When you start falling in love with someone, you don't realize that you might one day have to backtrack through the exact development of your relationship, looking for facts, specific dates when you met your loved one's friends and family for the first time, and random saved papers and receipts, with the urgent need to prove your love is genuine....because if you don't, you might have to go back to your own country to live, far away from your spouse.

Over a year ago, we excavated the living history of our relationship, arranged it in a way that tells the story of us, checked and re-checked never-ending pages of forms and supplemental information, and mailed it all in a box to immigration. The large stack eventually landed on the desk(s) of the stranger(s) in the immigration office tasked with sifting through all the artifacts to assess our relationship. There are a number of steps in the process of applying for permanent residency in Canada and a 3-page checklist of what specific forms and documents have to be included, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just say there are three major categories of forms and information that make up the application: sponsor information (the Canadian citizen), applicant information (the one who wishes to become a permanent resident, which was me), and then the relationship proof. The sponsor information is detailed, but not too bad. The applicant section is excruciatingly detailed. Just to give you an idea: One of the questions on the application is to list every organization, club, or group you have ever been involved with in your entire life, with your dates of membership (by month and year) and any positions or offices held. Since I started with clubs and activities as a young child, just this one question took weeks of tracking down information and resulted in 3-page spreadsheet.

Then there was the relationship proof. Do mushy statements show love is real? Or are financial statements and joint accounts more convincing? What about copies of receipts to show major shared purchases? Envelopes addressed to both people with a post mark proving the shared address and date? Thankfully, S and I both tend to save a lot of stuff and our cameras put accurate dates on our photos. We dug up all sorts of old cards, emails, and, unbelievably, even the receipt from our very first date. I still can not believe S had that in a pile of old receipts that I culled through after our last move. Bank account statements, cell phone bills, representative emails covering the span of our relationship, hand-written love notes, dating anniversary cards, wedding cards, Valentine cards, Facebook screen shots, airplane tickets to prove travel to see each other, and more. I compiled it and then organized it in a way I felt it would be most straight-forward for someone else to evaluate. Table of contents, numbered pages, printing labels to indicate exactly what each page was and our names, in case the pages got misplaced somehow. I went through a lot of labels, paper, and printer ink.

We opened up our relationship to a complete stranger. It's weird to think a person out there somewhere has read our quirky notes to each other and knows the nicknames we call each other. He or she has flipped through photos of us sightseeing in Italy and with family on Christmas Eve and exhausted after a big move to a new apartment. This person knows the exact story of how we met and the cookie that brought us together; yet, we don't know this person.

The current discourse on marriage fraud here in Canada is fear-fueled. There is a general lack of understanding of the process of spousal immigration (the act of marriage does not make one an automatic permanent resident, and certainly not an automatic citizen!). Those of us that have been through the spousal immigration process understand that it is a challenging, extremely thorough, and long process. We have heard of couples who have been together for 10 years and have kids who have gotten denied, so we knew to take the evaluation process seriously. Even though I am not from a country that has a high frequency of marriage fraud, we took months to prepare our application because we wanted there to be no question of the genuineness of our relationship. It was one of the most challenging applications I have ever done. Turns out, it takes a lot of paper and a lot of work to prove love.