supporting documents to prove relationship for married couple??

[ayaniqda]

Hi

I (EU) and my husband (non-EU, currently on Tier 4) got married in December 2017 outside UK. After the wedding I joined him in the UK and started working fulltime. I am now applying as qualified person for Residence certificate for myself and including my husband to change his Tier 4 to EEA family member.

Now the questions:

1. Do we need to provide evidence of our relationship before the wedding? Because of religious/cultural reasons, we never cohabited before the wedding. We were in a long distance relationship. We have some screen shots of our chat history and we had a couple of trips together and we have some tickets/pictures from those trips and the times I came to visit him in the UK before our wedding. Do you recommend including these or it is not necessary?

2. When my husband applied for his Tier 4 student visa in summer 2017, he declared his marital status as single in the application form. At this point we were in relationship but not yet engaged. The other option that one can discuss he could have marked on the form was "unmarried partner" but honestly he had thought that option is for unmarried couples who have registered themselves as civil partners and therefore not applicable to his situation. As I said in our religion/culture the meaning of being a couple is much different from what were back then. Back then even our relationship was not public except to our parents!

Now the question is if we provide evidence of our relationship in the past year, could it lead to him being accused of falsifying information (declaring himself as single) to HO as it will be clear that we were in relationship at the time he applied for his Tier 4 visa? Once again I like to highlight that he did not want to hide any information from the HO at all. He simply did not identified with the "unmarried partner" option on the form as he thought it is for those registered as civil partners.

I myself think that it is quite normal for people who are in a relationship (but unmarried or not engaged) to mark their marital status as single on official forms. but again I am carrying a lot of baggage from my own culture and religion and would want to know what do you think? Are we in trouble here?

[muraenidae]

I don't see why your past relationship status would be relevant. As you only came to the UK and started working there after the wedding, your husband would have been an EEA family member from that date as your spouse. Just supply your marriage certificate (+translation if not in English).

Also, no, you won't get in trouble for ticking "single" in a form before you got married. You don't have to declare girlfriends/fiancees in forms.