Living Apart

As I mention in yesterday's post, my husband and I lived apart for the first six months after we were married. But why get married if you can't live together?

For us, the whole engagement thing kind of came out of the blue. Neither one of us had been thinking about marriage, and we'd certainly never talked about it before. When M decided to take the plunge, his parents were only a few short weeks from their visit to America to see their son graduate. They'd planned the trip at length and already had their US visit visas in hand before he'd even popped the question, and when he did ask me to marry him, he did it by saying he wanted to get married when his parents were visiting.

So really, even before I'd said yes, the wedding date had been set. Or the date range at least. And it wasn't like I was going to drop out of school only one semester away from graduating just to go live the married life. There was no other choice, really, than to get married NOW even though we couldn't be together until later.

I remember that at the time it felt very unnatural. To be a newlywed, to want to talk about wedding details and mention how you'd only gotten married a few months prior - but then to live a thousand miles away from your new husband! I did visit M almost every single weekend after we were married, so it wasn't all sadness and separation. And of course time heals all wounds, so I only remember that time fondly. I have read a theory that having to live apart can actually prolong the infatuation stage that wears out so quickly, so it may have in the long run helped prolong that newlywed stage for us (and that can only be a good things, right!) 

Although there was one negative thing about it; we had to postpone our immigration stuff. M was a student in the US on an F-1 visa when I'd met him, and a few months before he'd graduated he had switch to a year of OPT ("Optional Practical Training") in order to work and stay in the US for a year even though he was no longer a student. He only had a year to change his status to something else or he wouldn't have any work authorization and he'd have to leave the US. His work would have sponsored him on an H-1 visa, but it was supposedly much faster and cheaper to pursue changing his status through his marriage with a citizen. (I am no specialist in immigration law, and this was all a few years ago, so please forgive and inaccuracies...) But because we had all his OPT time left, we thought it would be better to wait until we were living together to file out various paperwork. I just kept imagining two different addresses in our papers would raise plenty of red flags, and since we were only talking six months, it seemed like a better idea to wait and really *look* like a married couple on paper before trying to convince the US government of it.

Perhaps if we hadn't waiting so long, we wouldn't have run into as many problems during our (ongoing, unfortunately) immigration process. But that's a story for another day...