So it's a long story but please bare with me and my English. I've been in a LDR for a while now and it's been working really well. We don't see each other very often but I'm mad about him and I know he loves me very much too.
I'm going to be done with college in about a year and we plan to move in together after that, but there are a few problems. First, it will be hard for me to get a visa to live in his country and second, I will have to go back to college there because my diploma isn't valid in his country.
As we will be just starting a life together, we won't have a lot of money. Going to college there is very expensive, and if I don't have a permanent visa, I will have to pay international student fees (and really, it's just impossible for us to pay that).
There are very few options to get around this and one of them is getting married. According to the embassy, I can get a visa to live there and get married (but we must get married in less than 10 months). This would make lots of things easier, as a permanent resident I could get a loan and complete my studies there.
The other option is try to get another kind of visa that will be a lot more complicated to do and I may even have to be illegal for a while... and wait until God knows when so we can afford my studies.
10 months isn't very long, but I think it's enough time to decide if our relationship works living together. And of course, these aren't the only reasons why I want to marry him, I already planned on doing that one day, I thought we could wait until we had a more stable situation, but I love him very much and want to spend my life with him.
If you read it up to here, thanks for your patience. Now the issue is: How do I hint him about that? Should I even do that? I don't want to sound like I'm giving an ultimatum or something like that and if he isn't ready, I will get my visa some other way and wait until he is, and most important, I don't want to ruin my perfectly fine relationship because of this.
He knows what the options are, I've been thinking that if he wanted that, he might have said something. It'd still like to try in a subtle way though, maybe he will understand that this will make it easier for me to have a career too. He's very mature and he said that he wants to marry me, I just don't know if he will be ready in 2 years or so.
I think at the end of the day, and married people please feel free to give me hate if i'm wrong, the difference between living together and marriage is a piece of paper. So it's not this will make a huge difference on our every day life.
Any advice you can give me?