Before you know it, two years have passed and it’s time to make your visa permanent.

Your relationship is legitimate but you have to prove it anyway, so you gather your bank statements and tenancy agreements and you write squirming answers to the questions about the ways in which you emotionally support each other. You think, nobody said it would be romantic. You think, they call it sponsorship, not love.

The form asks if you’d be happy to be contacted by email. You say yes.

After you post off your application you go home, cut your fringe, dye your eyebrows and drink a beer in the bath. There is no specified celebration for this semi-milestone but you decide a self-preening-triptych is what the Department of Immigration and Border Protection would have wanted. Your boyfriend asks if you want to come down to his bar for a drink. You say yes.

Later – your face now properly framed – you sit at the bar with a glass of champagne and a shot of gin in front of you. You think, which one should I drink first? You think, in six months I’ll get an email that decides the rest of my life.

There are other people there who’ve been through a visa process so you say, Got my PR app in and they know what you mean. They cheers you. They offer you another shot of gin.

You say yes.

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A version of this post was sent by email on the 29th October 2016 as part of Internet Care Package.

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