Hope for EEA2 Unmarried Partners

[chilipower]

I've been wanting to write this for quite some time now, to give some of you out there hope for your application.

First of all our situation:

My partner (Indian national) and I (German national) have been living together in the UK since March 2011, and my partners previous visa expired in September 2012. My partner has a job in a call centre, I have a Graduate IT job (which pays better than the average Graduate Job I think, so this might have helped) We have no children. This means, in our application we could only prove 1.5 years of cohabitation 'akin to marriage'. Also our joint account wasn't covering the entire period of us living together.
After doing a lot of research online, contacting several lawyers and having a meeting with one, before we submitted the EEA2 application we felt pretty certain that we wouldn't get it without fulfilling the 2 year requirement and both went through a really rough time of Plan B scheming and evaluating the options (Marriage? Breakup? Moving elsewhere?) before and after the application was submitted.

Long story short: We received the residence card anyway on first attempt after exactly 6 months of processing time!

Here is what we recommend to other people in our situation:
- Open up your private life: send photos of you together (preferrably with different hair cuts, clothes, different places, seasons,....) looking couply, with touching and kissing and some pics with other people as well
- Send them loving chats/mail conversations
- Valentines and Birthday Cards
- Get your friends to write "References" for you, about stuff you do together, how long you know each other etc
- Write a letter to them about why you want this visa, what your future plans are together, etc
- Of course we also submitted all the usual documents with both our names on it, tenancy agreements, joint account statements, bills, council tax... we didn't have too many of these, so I wrote an explanation in the cover letter about who pays for what and how we share the financial responsibility even the bills are in only one persons name.

I don't want to go so far as to say that this is the ultimate recipe to success but wanted to give hope to you lovers out there who fear you might get pulled apart because of the visa. It is not impossible to get the visa if you have less than 2 years of documentation. You just need to really prove that you are a genuine couple. <3

I really hope this helps some of you guys out there and despair not, it might be just fine...

Good Luck to all of you!

[httdong]

thanks a lot.
That is very helpful

[hannah85]

Hi there,
We sent last week our eea2 application for my Indian partner. We do have more than 24 months of living together and we sent a 2 kg file with joint bills photos emails Facebook messages etc.... So durable relationship us not a problem. Our worry is the fact that he has overstayed his previous visa with 2 years. Not intentionally, it was just an application returned as invalid because of photos size , which made all the applict to be out of time. His passport was held by ukba, which even expired in the meantime..... We have written a statement hoping it will clarify things and he can be issued a residence card, but we don't know how much of a problem would overstaying cause. Have anyone been in a situation like ours and still was issued a residence card? I would appreciate to hear some similar stories.