My favorite part of the application is entitled: Section K7, Minimum requirements for the recognition of partnerships. This is the part of the residency application where I prove that I didn't pay David $10K to get me into the country. Therefore, we have to submit documentation of our long-term, committed relationship. This doesn't mean you have to be married, but if you are, you have to provide a marriage certificate. In section K7, they note that New Zealand will not recognize your marriage if it is with any of the following: your grandmother, your grandfather's wife, your father's sister, your daughter, your son's son's wife, your step mom, your father, your daughter's husband, your husband's daughter's son, your husband's son, or your brother, among many others. I'm rather tempted to call the immigration hotline to ask obnoxious questions like, "I'm married to my son's son's wife, but my son's son died in a tragic curling accident last year, and when I met his wife at the funeral, we bonded over our mutual love of period banjo music. Is that okay?"
One of the things we have to do to prove our relationship is send Immigration NZ copies of correspondence between David and I. So I went through all the emails we've sent to each other in the past two years, and didn't even know where to begin. The first two or three messages we exchanged are written in English and would make sense to the outside world, but beyond that most of our emails are primarily pictures of platypuses and elephants (my two favorite animals), with an occasional NYT article thrown in. These emails would definitely not inspire confidence in our sanity to the level required for residency.
Besides proving that we are in a legit relationship, Immigration NZ also wants a detailed medical history, leading me to wonder why they need to know when my last menstrual cycle was. And do we really need to do a faeces culture? It seems to me that Immigration New Zealand wants to know a whole lot more about me than I want to know about myself.
