A busy few days gathering documents and trying to work out how you prove that you love someone. It sounds bizarre, yes, but that is how applying for a visa works. The onus of proof is squarely (and rightly) on the applicants. The words I love you and the many tiny acts that constitute two people being in love and living a life together cannot easily be rendered in humdrum documentation. Unless you go to great trouble collecting every letter, receipt, bill and the like, anticipating the road ahead in advance like a clairvoyant, then it's truly difficult.

Sure, if you have set up a sham marriage for the sake of obtaining a visa, then you are likely to have planned all of this in advance. You will be collecting and conniving because you are not in love but engaged in a process of fakery and the production of moments and paperwork is all part of the artifice. But if you have courted each other, fallen in love, exchanged marriage vows and begun to build a genuine life together, then these things count for very little and end up in the recycling or lost forever.

I have faith that love will prevail in the end, even though the path, tortuous be.