[unar]

Hi,

Asking for more help... sorry. There is a question on the application I don't know how to answer. It wants to know when our partnership started.. is it the date when we first started dating or the day we got married? I guessed the marriage day, because that it is when everything became official.. but not sure... plus I can't remember when we really started dating any how. :)

Thanks.
-una

[Jo Jo]

I put the date my husband and I met, which is when our relationship started, really.

[napiers]

So did I - put the date we met I mean.

[kiwijock]

We also put date we met - as you don't have to be married to apply under partnership

[catt]

me too date we started seeing each other

[unar]

Thanks for all your help. Will tried to figure out the day we met, wish I remember such things.

-Una

[Ness]

Do you have phone bills? We submitted some from the beginning of our relationship...Dh and I only met a year ago, he got the NZ job offer in Feb 08, we got married in Mar 08, so we don't have much official-looking 'meat' to our relationship for NZIS purposes. Who knows if it'll work, but I started looking for every little shred of evidence of our relationship.

Good luck!
Ness

[unar]

Hi Ness,

We don't have any joint bills and stuff, so just sending in separate bank statements as relationship evidence, also some pictures, joint membership to associations, plane tickets of trips together and some postcards and christmas cards from friends addressed to both of us. Hopefully these are enough. I think with electronic banking and standing orders being so common, is getting more difficult to find paper evidence now. They should change the rules or something.

Luckily we have been married for three years, so we don't have to find any thing for the start of our relationship (I hope). Maybe I can dig out some old emails...we know is sometime after the end of Euro2004 around the time Spiderman II came out :). If you think you don't have enough evidence, one way is to get your friends and family to write support letters stating how long you guys have been dating/living together and also how lovely a couple you are.

Good luck to you too.
-Una

[Ness]

You shouldn't have a problem then, being married for 3 years. They just want shared residence for one year or longer.

I'm saving the file of relationship evidence I assembled for NZIS to use with US immigration when we have our interview for my green card next year, so it'll come in handy!

But still, the whole thing felt a bit undignified -I wonder if they feel 'icky' looking through intimate stuff like correspondence with each other!

Ness

[dharder]

I think the main thing is they want to see that you've lived together for a year or longer. Married or not is irrelevant. You could be married for 20 years, but you will still have to prove that you've lived together for the last 12 months.

We haven't sent anything that felt so personal I wouldn't want to share it, mainly joint bank statements (okay, not something I normally share, but not really private correspondence), council tax bills in both our names, stuff like that.

The photos we sent didn't feel terribly personal, they were just photos of us and kids.

All in all, I don't think it felt particularly intrusive, but I might have felt differently had they questioned our evidence, or had asked to talk to us to see if we were really in a relationship.

Good luck,

Daniela

[Ness]

Yeah, we just felt we had to provide some of that more intimate evidence to prove the genuineness of our relationship, because we hadn't lived together for 12 months...and we still don't know if it was enough, but we hope so!

It actually seems like the NZIS system is quite reasonable in this respect, esp not requiring that people are married. The USCIS is waaaaay more probing, and without a marriage certificate, you have no claim to anything.