Stage 2

And here we are.

We lodged our prospective marriage visa on 13 August 2013. On 31 October that visa was granted and only three weeks later Americo arrived here with three giant suitcases in tow.

Two more weeks and we were married. Nine days later we had our first "real" Christmas together. Then our first New Year. And our first Valentines day.

And today, just two days after our two month wedding anniversary, Immigration has granted his temporary residency visa.

For the next two years he gets to stay here. We don't have to do any more applications. We don't have to pay any more money. In two years they get in touch and ask for some more evidence that we're still together, and then, all going according to plan he gets permanent residency.

For all our six years of apart, and the stresses that come with a long distance relationship, we have been astoundingly lucky in our immigration process. Our applications were straight forward, our approvals fast, and our case officers kind and professional. I am painfully aware the process is far from easy for most, and even our process wasn't entirely easy.

We were prepared for this in so many ways because we are both well organised with our emails, calls and evidence. We knew long in advance of our application that we'd need to have evidence, so we kept our skype call logs and chats, we kept so many emails, all the travel documents, letters, cards, both to each other and from others. Add to that our joint love of photography and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence of our relationship and love for each other.

My particularly organised brain and my experience with understanding government forms made it easy to put all the evidence together and complete the forms. Even with that experience we both managed to get questions wrong because of confusing wording. For people that don't have experience with government it must be painfully challenging to fill in those forms. I can't even imagine the greater difficulty for those for which English is not their first language.

Australia is a beautiful country. We are full of kind people with great hearts that have capacity to love and welcome people from all around the world. We are a country of immigrants whose cultures and traditions make this beautiful country what it is.

My wish for this country, and the world in general, is that we can all find within ourselves the kindness to make immigration as easy for everyone, as it was for us.