majandra

Anybody who follows my posts knows how passionately I advocate that the removal of conditions is just a formality and as easy as it gets for people who are really married. You, however, are only married on paper, and for such couples the ROC process has been introduced. I don't see any evidence because you do not have any. And how would you, if you never really lived with your husband but lived in a state for away right from the start? Frankly, I don't see any grounds for USCIS to give you unlimited residence based on the fact of your marriage, and that's what the process is all about.

We have lived together for the past 8 months and also for a three month period while I was interning, the issue is that since we stayed with parents, we don't have any joint bills. When we were dating he had a well-paying job as a loan officer but with the economy he couldn't get any more work that way. I have financially provided for him for two years as have my parents, so we are very much married, its just that our situation (me having still been in school and him not getting another well-paying job) has made it hard to have the kind of evidence they will want, outside of pictures and mail sent to the same address.

My husband and I will be filing to remove his conditional status in the weeks leading up to September 15th, 2010, but I'm starting to worry we won't have sufficient evidence to provide. Our situation is pretty weird since we have never actually lived on our own before, and have kept our finances completely separate. We met while I was interning in a different state, and since we were both students, we actually spent the first 1.5 years on the marriage living 1000 miles away from one another (I did move in with his family for three months on a subsequent internship during that time period). During that entire time he worked for a family business, where he took home no profit except to pay for gas/insurance and continued living with his family, so he never needed money for supporting himself. My parents continued to pay my support throughout college, and when I moved in with his family after graduating last summer, they continued to pay groceries/gas (no rent obviously) for me since I didn't find work until late October and my husband couldn't find a real, paying job. In January of this year, after 4 months with his family, I moved back home with my parents due to a serious problem one of my friends was going through. I found work immediately, and he came up to stay with us one month later and has been up here working for three months now, but not making nearly enough for us to even qualify for an apartment still. We will be moving back down to his city in the next few weeks as I have a new job starting down there in June...

The issue is that we have absolutely no joint accounts for anything. We used to have a checking account together, but he was the only one that used it and he kept overdrawing and the bank was calling and harassing me all the time, so we removed my name from the account. He doesn't even trust himself enough to try getting a credit card. We file taxes Married Filing Separately for both years because my parents still claim me as a dependent, since he doesn't provide for me financially. We have never lived on our own, we've always stayed at one of our parents' houses, so we have no lease/mortgage/utility bills. We don't have joint ownership of any cars (he bought his with cash, my parents bought me mine) and we have no children yet as I just graduated college and plan to continue onto graduate studies. (We are listed on each others car insurance plans though). In our AOS interview we had A LOT of pictures, as well as phone lists to prove how much we stayed in contact, but since we have been living together basically non-stop for 10 months now we obviously don't call/take as many pictures as before. The good side to this is that we did take a trip to his home country together for a week, where we stayed with his family (and took a ton of pictures), so hopefully that will count for something.

Now to throw one more kink into this huge confusing situation is that since he came up to stay with my family we have been having serious relationship issues and aren't getting along. When I move back to his state in the summer I know that I definitely can't stay with his family anymore (they caused a lot of problems to begin with) and I don't even want to stay with him because I want the chance to be self-sufficient for the first time, besides the fact that he still won't be able to support me. I'm sure with our lack of evidence the INS will call us in for an interview and I don't know how to deal with it if we are living separately. I would like to try marriage counseling to work on our problems and I think the INS would see that as a good sign, but I'm sure he won't be able to afford it and I'm not going to help him anymore financially (I have already lent him over $5000 and my family has paid for EVERYTHING since he has been up here with them) so I don't know if we will be able to go to counseling. BTW, 99% of our problems stem from his lack of financial responsibility (which didn't become blatantly obvious until I graduated and was expecting not to have to live with in-laws anymore, since he never really need much money before then anyways). I'm wanting to still give him time to get a job and be able to help support us before making any decisions on the outcome of our relationship, but I feel like it will all be happening too close to the conditions removal deadline for my tastes.

Do you think explaining our long complicated living situation will make a difference to them (it did at least for the AOS) in regards to not having joint expenses? Do you think going to marriage counseling will make it OK (or at least tolerable) that we won't be living together at that time? My friend thinks I should just divorce now and he could try to remove conditions on his own, but I don't feel ready to give up on the relationship completely in the next few months. I need more time and want to give him one another chance, but I also worry if we finish going through the process, then end up getting divorced in the next year or so, then if I want marry another foreigner (a high possibility considering I've never dated an American before) in the future that it will make it impossibly difficult (I already know it would be difficult, I'm just worried because I only want to give him like 6-8 more months to change, so filing for divorce 2-3 months after he's a PR will look highly suspicious on my part.) What do you guys think? I apologize for the length of this post, but I'm just trying to decide what the best course of action is for both of us now.