Billious

Thank you so much for the quick response. My initial inclination is similar to your advice - I'm just not certain if her work visa creates any conflict since she is technically already "in the US" for the purposes of immigration. As for getting to the consular appointment, it's really not a matter of taking time out of a busy schedule... it's when we are on contract, we are at the mercy of the ship. We work 7 days a week for the entire length of our contract, in her case 10 months. So she will not realistically be able to make any kind of consular appointment until next March.

So I think we'll do the legal wedding in November right away, and get the paperwork put in right away afterwards. Hopefully then the consular appointment will be at least 4 months down the line, and then from what I can tell, processing times average around 7 months total? Does this sound realistic?

Hello everyone! I had the incredible luck of meeting my fiancee this last winter while working on a cruise ship with her, and we are planning on getting married this coming Winter. This is a moment of incredible joy for me, but I'm finding that our situation is sufficiently complicated to merit asking advice.

She is currently on a US work visa, but the ship she is on will not be back to a US port until November. I will join her on ship then for about 4 months, and we're hoping to get married down in the Caribbean somewhere (US Virgin Islands seems like a likely choice). We will both leave the ship in March, and she will come to my city here in the US for 10 days before she and I go to Indonesia for the inevitable family ceremony there. From there, we'd like to have her move here as soon as possible.

The question becomes whether to file for a Fiancee visa now, or to wait until we get married and file for an IR/CR-1. The complicating factor will be that there will be no reasonable way to schedule a US Embassy interview until our contract is done in early March (for all intents and purposes, it's impossible to schedule when she can get off the ship in port - in my position I have a lot more flexibility).

Further complicating (or helping?) matters is that she is technically "in the US" right now... She joined the ship in Florida, and will debark in Florida, and she had to obtain a work visa to do that. When her contract ends, her work visa gives her 10 days before she has to return to Indonesia. Is there any reason we might be able to skip the K1 and just do an adjustment of status after the wedding? For what it's worth, I think we should have no problem with the interview process, as neither of us has ever been married, she's got all the documents she should need with her, and we've got plenty of proof of a real relationship (I had an amazing visit with her friends and family over in Indonesia a few months ago!)

Any advice and information anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated. I've gone through the USCIS website, called them (a singularly unhelpful experience), and read through a number of posts here. Thanks in advance!