dbca

I really can't thank you guys enough. These replies have been extremely helpful. We've been racking our brains over this for a while but now it's clear how to proceed. We'll include only our permanent residences in our home countries as the places we've lived, say we have not lived together yet, and then include passport stamps, photos, boarding passes, etc. as evidence of having spent time together traveling. I'm going to upload separate pdf files for our passports, including every page of each one (I have one that expired recently but has most of my stamps for our travels together). But in addition to this, should I combine all the various types of evidence for each trip together into one file, including photos of us in a single country alongside the boarding passes to and from that country, and also the passport stamps from both out passports for entering and exiting that country? Or upload one pdf file with all the travel photos from all the different countries, another with all the boarding passes, and let them connect the dots themselves so to speak? I have a lot of passport stamps from solo trips before we met so it might be a slog for them to search through it all.

(3) One more question: "Is your current mailing address the same as your physical address?" I'm putting my house in California as my mailing address while we're on the road, so should I put our current hotel/Airbnb at the time of submitting the I-130 as my "physical address" or say it is the same as the mailing address?

Thank you all for these replies. I think our passport stamps alone will provide strong evidence of the authenticity of our relationship. (We're also including about 30 photos from our travels, and the times when my family has come to visit us abroad.) Just a couple more questions: (1) If we include the handful of addresses where we have stayed for 3 months or more, what should we put for our residences for the periods between those? For example, I was at home in California before going to Colombia, and then after that we spent a couple weeks in Istanbul. So, should the list of my residences go California->Colombia->California? Since I had no other residence during our time in Istanbul, even though I did not physically return to California? Or is it acceptable to have gaps in the list of residential addresses? (2) Even though the rental contract from Colombia is not necessary to demonstrate that we were together during those months, would it still be worthwhile as evidence of: A lease showing joint tenancy of a common residence, meaning you both live at the same address together; Documentation showing that you and your spouse have combined your financial resources; All of the other hotel and Airbnb do not specifically mention my wife's name, and we do not share a bank account or have property owned in common. Would it the inclusion of the rental contract (with certified translation) help to make our case significantly stronger? Thanks again for your guidance.

"Where did you and your spouse last live together?" would be the main question on the I-130 I'm asking about. As well as our individual address histories for the past 5 years.

In 2021 my wife and I rented a house in her home country (Colombia), where I would say we "lived" together for 4 months. As an American, I was subject to a visa-free policy for up to 6 months. We had a notarized rental agreement which we both signed. When we rented the house it was my intention to apply for a residential visa to stay there with her for the next year or two. But our plans changed and we decided to travel abroad to third countries and see the world, which we are still doing. We have spent every day together for the past couple of years, but since we left Colombia I wouldn't really say we've been "living" together, simply traveling together for a very long time. I have read knowledgeable members of this forum state that to be considered to have "lived together" one must have a residential permit for the country in which one "lived". That makes sense. But it also seems counterintuitive to say that we did not live together despite having a joint rental contract and the intention to pursue a residential permit while not specifically being on a tourist visa, but rather inside of a visa-free period. It also seems downright misleading to list only my long-term home in the US on the list of places I've lived in the past five years while I had a rented house in Colombia where I spent every day with my wife. Please help me sort this out. I want to include the rental agreement as evidence of a bona fide relationship, but I want to be technically correct about how it is included and not contradict myself while listing our addresses. Some additional questions if you happen to know the answers: does the rental contract, which is in Spanish, need to be translated? And should any of the temporary rentals we've stayed in (some for nearly 3 months at a time) deserve to be included in the list of places we've "lived" despite having been there under visa-free regimes and with no intention of pursuing residency permits? Thanks for your time and help.