I think to educate the officers would be one recommendation. I'm Indian, and India is a huge country. I'm from a place called Goa, which was a Catholic Portuguese colony. The majority of the people used to be Catholic, but people look at you...and in north India we have Punjabi, and every culture is different. Talking, for example, for India, I would say they need to be educated. In India and in these other cultures these are the kinds of marriages. In Arab countries it might be a different situation in the Middle East and maybe in Africa.
You have to understand what the idea of marriage is. In some cultures they say, “We would like you to marry this boy.” They meet and then they say, “Yes, okay. I'm willing to take the chance of marrying. My parents have interviewed the family.” This is an arranged marriage and people work towards it. There are people who meet through their parents. They are introduced with the prospect of being the husband. They start off with, “This is a nice guy. Date him. See if you like him, and get married to him.”
It's different for different cultures. Everybody is not Canadian outside of Canada, where they meet and they date for years and years. That's not a cultural thing. I don't know whether that's Canadian culture, but that's certainly been my experience, where you hear people saying, “I've dated for years,” but then you also have the flip side that says, “I met this guy three months ago, and I'm getting married in three months.”
You have to understand that love is not something, or a marriage is not something, where we can dictate whether it's genuine or not, but there can be checks and balances that we have already, where the officer asks to explain why they should believe the marriage is genuine and continuing. In my experience, I advise my clients, “Write your story. Tell us how you met. Tell us what makes this person special, and why you got married.”