I am a UK national living in England and my boyfriend is a Turkish national living in Turkey (non-EU). We met 3.5 years ago at a conference. Since then we have maintained a long distance relationship first by email, then by Skype and then in addition to Skyping every night we began to meet every 2-3 months – as often as we could afford the time off work and the cost of travelling. We realised that we loved each other very much and that we wanted to spend our lives together and start a family. We decided to wait until my boyfriend completed his PhD in February this year before living together. We also decided it would be better to live together in the UK since I have a secure, well paid position as a PhD qualified scientist here in the UK and there are more opportunities for him to get a good position here too with his recent PhD. However, it is now mid-December and we are still living in our respective countries. Until February, we were unaware that the UK Border Agency had closed the Tier 1 highly skilled migrant working visa route. Now we understand that the only possible working visa route is the Tier2 General which requires you to obtain a job offer before being able to apply for a working visa. This route seems almost impossible since the vast majority of advertised positions require you to have the right to work in the UK before you can apply. Those that don’t require you to have the right to work say something similar to “it is highly unlikely that we will offer a Tier2 certificate of sponsorship for this position – are you sure you want to continue with your application”. After nearly 10 months of applying for job after job after job only to be unsuccessful again and again and again we are so upset. We are so frustrated about these Tier2 General rules. We are spending all our spare time writing job applications and trying to find solutions about how we can be together. We have already waited so long but now we have decided that we don’t want to wait any longer to be together. Our lives are passing us by and it is very likely that we can still be in this situation in another year’s time due to the difficulty in obtaining a Tier2 visa. Since we know that we want to get married and start a family anyway, we have decided that we will get married in Turkey and then apply for the UK spouse visa which would allow us to be together finally and also give my boyfriend the right to work in the UK. While he looks for a job here my salary will be enough to support him. But, after reading the UK Border Agency website’s requirements for the spouse visa we were heartbroken to read that one of the requirements is that you have to give evidence that you are living together with your partner. This is impossible for us! How can we have the chance to live together without a visa? The longest we have lived together is one month when my boyfriend came to stay here with me this summer. We have evidence of all the other spouse visa requirements – we have met each other’s families three times each, we have so many photos of holidays together over the past 3.5 years and receipts and booking confirmations for all our travels and hotels we have stayed in. We have a 3.5 year history of emails, Skype conversations, Facebook and phone records. We meet the financial requirement and my boyfriend meets the English requirement. He has applied for 5 visitor visas since we have been together and all of them have been successfully granted.
Our questions are these:
Is it true that it is an absolute requirement that you have to live together in order to obtain a spouse visa?
Are there any other visa routes available to us?
We would be so grateful for any help. We just want to start living our lives together as soon as possible.
Thank you.
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