There’s no set track that your relationship has to follow. There are a lot of people who say, “You can’t get engaged on your first meeting. You have to have a formal engagement. You have to have an engagement ring.” That’s not really the case.

The reality is that the burden is on you to prove that you have a real relationship. Here
at Immigration for Couples, we work with our couples and we understand that every relationship is unique. We don’t look at our client cases as cookie-cutter versions that everybody has to follow the same path or the same way of doing things.

We work with whatever your particular situation is. We look at your case, we look at your evidence as if we were an immigration officer. We look for red flags and we really work on looking at your timeline and things like that.

In general, getting engaged in the first meeting isn’t necessarily a problem. If you have a lot of bona fide evidence, that’s good. But in general, it’s going to depend on how strong your evidence is and how long your relationship has been. It’s not necessarily going to cause a problem just because you got married on your first meeting.

What can become an issue is the length of your relationship and the quality. Just because somebody has a lot of evidence of the relationship doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s enough. If you have a ton of evidence, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s enough because immigration has different categories for what evidence is strongest.

Photos and letters of support for friends and family; they’re nice but they’re considered low-level evidence. Having that alone is not enough. You had a short relationship and then you got engaged during the first meeting, that might not be enough to win your case.

Getting engaged in the first meeting shouldn’t necessarily be a problem. However, it will depend on the strength of all of the relationship evidence that you have.