The question of marriage

[Nomoneyhoney]

I'm new to this forum so hello to anyone reading this. I'm Jeremy from Australia and I met my now girlfriend from London online in mid 2017. It wasn't the best of times or circumstances to fall in love for either of us. I had spent the last decade finally getting over someone that broke my heart in a long distance relationship over the most complicated reasons not all in our control, so starting another relationship or ever getting involved with someone in this way again was well and truly off the table. Plus she was engaged. It seemed a safe friendship and nothing more but as time went on we both realised (without saying anything and equally ignoring it) that we were perfect for each other and quietly, slowly, we fell in love with each other without the others knowledge. Once I realised how I felt I decided to kill those feelings and not allow them to grow.. this didn't really work but even so I decided never to tell her. It wouldn't be right she was engaged after all. Even though I knew her relationship was a very abusive one that she was afraid to leave I would never disrespect it and besides I'd blown up my life before spending all my thought and money on a relationship with someone across the planet and I'm not the kind of person to make the same mistake twice. But this really was different. We just worked together even at the distance no matter how much we both tried to pretend that wasn't the case. We were both more in love than we have ever been even though everything in our lives said we couldn't be. She was the one to break the silence. She told me everything she had been feeling and that she was sorry to ruin our friendship with it all but she had to just tell me and not talk to me again because she wasn't eating or sleeping. That's when I had no choice but to be honest as well.

Long story short it's a year later and I'm writing this now from our place in London. She left her fiancee two months before I came here. We met. It was nerve inducing, beautiful but never awkward. I had no where to go and spent my last dime even getting here to see her so she asked me to not go back home and move in with her. So I did and it's been four months. Money has been tough as this is London and she is a student and has other issues restricting the time she can actually work. I haven't been able to work because it's illegal so I've got by collecting money from work I've done owed to me and borrowing. We know this isn't sustainable and when the maximum allowable time in the country (6 months) hits in a month I will have no choice but to leave and go back to Australia. I won't get into her issues but I really feel if I had not come here when I did she would be dead. She's been through things no human being should ever have to endure. I'm terrified without me here she'll fall apart again and she's doing so well now but still the reality of our situation remains. She's about to enter her final year of her degree or she'd at least have the option to leave with me. It's messy. We decided we want to get married but it'll probably be years before we can afford a wedding. We both have no family or any other support. We talked about getting legally married and having a "proper" wedding in the future when we can afford rings and all the rest but I struggle with the idea of her ever thinking I was marrying her because I HAD to in order to be with her. I think she knows I would want to anyway and it's only the finance that ever stopped me from asking.

I can't see any VISA options (that I'm aware exist anyway) for someone like me to move to the UK in a way that will allow me to work here and even if we get married I'm not sure what us being married even allows me or how many years that would take to have any effect as far as earning an income in England legally goes. All I can think of is I'll have to go back to Australia and work and save money again to return as much as that will kill both of us to be apart. But if we married here before I left at least the process will have started. If we did that though we'd have to do it very soon so I don't even know if it's possible. We don't even know the process of how people get married here. I'm assuming some kind of marriage registration office but there may be other things that need to be done in our situation I have no idea of.

Has anyone else here been through anything similar or looked into what's involved in getting married in this situation? I don't even know where to start or who to ask to figure out the ins and outs immigrationwise or what options we have if any. We can barely afford to eat most weeks so paying someone for advice is out of the equation. If anyone can offer any advice or has married in the UK and knows how it works I figured it was worth a shot asking. Thanks for reading either way.

[kittyo9]

To answer all your questions and "where to start," the answer is google. Since you have lots of time on your hands, now is a good time to do some research.

You can look up things like:
"how to get married in England"
"how to sponsor spouse to come to the UK/Australia"
"financial requirements to sponsor spouse to UK/Australia"

Read, make notes, click links, and google subsequent questions. Don't just ask here-- although we do have some members who have closed the distance by marriage in the UK, you will invariably have unique circumstances that will need to be considered. There are a number of sites and forums online, as well as official government websites, dedicated to people marrying and immigrating to the UK/Aus (depending on which way you want to go). Perhaps someone who has or is currently in one of these processes can provide some other resources.

If you or your SO don't meet the criteria for sponsorship, you need to either work towards meeting those criteria or find another way to immigrate. That might mean a working holiday or work sponsorship in the other's country that later leads to permanent residence. Getting married because it's the only option to close the distance permanently sucks, but it is unfortunately often an inevitability in international relationships. If you've decided you want to marry each other, consider the visa a perk of marriage, not marriage as a prerequisite of the visa.

Don't compromise your finances-- it's kind of a sad fact of life, but you need to have money and your SO needs to have income to sponsor you (or vice versa if you go the other way). Going back to Australia and working while your SO finishes up her program may be the best option moving forward (with or without getting married first). If you can barely afford to eat, getting yourselves into a situation where you're financially stable is way more important than having a wedding or closing the distance.

My SO and I had the marriage-to-close-the-distance discussion in January of this year. We both agreed we didn't want to be forced into marriage for a visa if we could avoid it, but accepted that if we were unable to find any alternatives, that we would go that route. I spent a lot of time googling things and scouring the Canadian government's website. I actually ended up finding a different immigration stream that I qualified for independently, without having to be sponsored by my SO. I was also able to find other alternatives, but most of them took much longer or had more strenuous requirements. I think I had like 3 or 4 different google docs at one point with details on every program I was looking at so that I could hash out the things I needed/wanted to do and add notes from other sources and people who had gone through the process.