Matt and I have been talking about marriage and babies - like, a lot. He's been giving hints out the wazoo about wanting to get married and have children very soon, but the thing that's concerning him the most is affording a wedding. I want to keep our budget to about $10k, and he wants to wait until we have enough to afford a beautiful special day. Since he's unable to quantify how much a special, amazing wedding day costs, I'm going to put it at $20k. I never thought I'd be lowballing a guy about wedding costs, geesh.

This, however, brought up a point we ended up arguing about. I just found out that since we live in NSW and the territory allows relationship registration, we can register our relationship and apply as de facto relationship status. By registering our relationship, the 12 month minimum time requirement for the visa is waived, so we would be gold. And after I told Matt this, it was like a light went off in his brain.

So we're waiting on getting married so we can have "a very special day." I admit a small part of me was hurt at first - I don't want to wait. We're madly in love, and we want to get married. But I realized that a wedding with only one half fully ok with that date is a wedding wasted, and I don't want him to feel like he didn't have the wedding he wanted because I wanted to padlock our visa application in.

I just hope that I'm not going "When is it going to be my turn?" I don't want to turn into one of those women.

Fucking insecurity moment. I'm going to blame it on moving stress. I don't usually have crazy thoughts like that.

ETA: A few people are confused so I wanted to add since it's not clear from only this blog post: I'm not worried about hurrying things along. I don't feel impatient, nor am I trying to rush things. My SO and I have talked about marriage and our future often. Our check-ins are important because they keep us on the same page about how we want to handle the future visa applications, which is important seeing as we have a mountain of evidence to collect and have to meet certain requirements which need to be planned in advance in order to be able to stay together rather than me leaving after a year.

My relationship is fine, no one is rushing anything, and it's a joy to get to enjoy one another. However, it's hard to go from planning a wedding to unplanning a wedding, and at the moment, disappointment is bitter. I'm feeling fine about it now, because this conversation was a few days ago. It didn't stop the sting at the time, however.

Above all else, let me say this: a wedding does not a relationship make. It's a ceremony - an important ceremony - but it's not all-inclusive of life. Our life together is wonderful; we just need to make sure we have our visa ducks in a row in order to continue having that life together, because otherwise, we may not be able to live on the same continent together as a normal married husband and wife due to high visa restrictions in both of our countries.