ForumTitleContentMemberSexCountryDate/Time
Middle East and North AfricaI gotta say Thanks to you all
The police at this point are as much for his protection as hers; they can be an impartial witness and can ensure that neither side escalates anything.
CaladanMaleCanada2007-08-13 10:12:00
Middle East and North AfricaI gotta say Thanks to you all
dee, if you need (or want) to return to your house, please take along a friend or neighbor as a witness. Preferably a big beefy cousin or brother, but maybe ask the imam to come along with you.
CaladanMaleCanada2007-08-10 15:15:00
Middle East and North AfricaI gotta say Thanks to you all
God, dee. *hug* I'm so sorry.
CaladanMaleCanada2007-08-10 12:50:00
Middle East and North AfricaAnother Countdown Thread!!!!!!






What are the many red flags? She asked questions to get him confused and he answered all, she went on and at the end the only thing she could say was that we have not known each other long enough. This makes me sick. I did not know there where time constraints and again it is a K-1 VISA. Fiance not a marriage visa, we get 3 months and then you have to get married.


First off, I'm very sorry to hear of your setback. This sucks, and I hope you can fight it.

But a fiancé visa isn't a 'get-to-know-each-other-better' visa. In order to file it, you have to sign a letter saying you already intend to get married. That's the assumption the government makes: if you're applying for this visa, you already know the person well enough to get married. The three months is there to make it easier to get in the country, get married, and adjust status, not so the couple can see if they like each other well enough.

Now, there's no specific time limit, like you must have known each other a year and a half in person or anything. But because the fiancé visa is for bringing someone here to marry, not to get to know them, they will look at the timeline as one of many things they'll use to figure out if the relationship is legit. We may all use the 90 days to get comfortable with our fiancé, but as far as the government is concerned, we have to be mentally ready on day 1 at the PoE. Saying 'we've only known each other a week but we'll have three months to be sure' isn't going to be convincing as you fight this.


It is funny but I wanted to share one thing with the group, one of my fiance cousins she is here and she is from Morocco. The US citizen was male and he applied for her and they have been marrie dfor 5 years, she and him from start of relationship until the POE was 5 months. So tell me what about time here?


I think you're thoroughly misunderstanding me. There is no required time limit. My only point here is that if the consulate says 'you haven't known each other long enough to be engaged' and your response is 'but we'll have 90 days once he's here to see if we're right for each other', that isn't going to fly.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-18 08:27:00
Middle East and North AfricaAnother Countdown Thread!!!!!!

What are the many red flags? She asked questions to get him confused and he answered all, she went on and at the end the only thing she could say was that we have not known each other long enough. This makes me sick. I did not know there where time constraints and again it is a K-1 VISA. Fiance not a marriage visa, we get 3 months and then you have to get married.


First off, I'm very sorry to hear of your setback. This sucks, and I hope you can fight it.

But a fiancé visa isn't a 'get-to-know-each-other-better' visa. In order to file it, you have to sign a letter saying you already intend to get married. That's the assumption the government makes: if you're applying for this visa, you already know the person well enough to get married. The three months is there to make it easier to get in the country, get married, and adjust status, not so the couple can see if they like each other well enough.

Now, there's no specific time limit, like you must have known each other a year and a half in person or anything. But because the fiancé visa is for bringing someone here to marry, not to get to know them, they will look at the timeline as one of many things they'll use to figure out if the relationship is legit. We may all use the 90 days to get comfortable with our fiancé, but as far as the government is concerned, we have to be mentally ready on day 1 at the PoE. Saying 'we've only known each other a week but we'll have three months to be sure' isn't going to be convincing as you fight this.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-18 06:46:00
Middle East and North AfricaJP's Official Countdown Thread
Good luck, JP!
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-18 20:56:00
Middle East and North AfricaNajia's Official Countdown Thread
Rock it!
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-18 21:00:00
Middle East and North AfricaDoubts?
I wouldn't say anything here, because you can barely get more than a sketch of someone's life, most times. But if I were certain (not even sure what that would take) that someone were being used, I think I'd have to say something.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-24 21:40:00
Middle East and North AfricaDoubts part II


deeshla hit the nail on the head. There is something between chastity belt and orgy, and most relationships are somewhere in the middle, and *all* of them change once the person is married.

How couldn't it? To take one little thing, our relationship won't be defined by visits any more. It won't be fun mini-vacations, but life where we're both working.

Most relationships change over time regardless. I don't think it constitutes a sham marriage though. You can live with someone for 10 years and still not really know them.


No one said 'sham.' (I said 'all change once the person is married.') I do think it's easier to put something over on someone long distance, even if you have a webcam, but that doesn't mean that all relationships that are long distance are fake, or that all relationships that aren't long distance are true. But playing the odds?
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-27 11:09:00
Middle East and North AfricaDoubts part II
deeshla hit the nail on the head. There is something between chastity belt and orgy, and most relationships are somewhere in the middle, and *all* of them change once the person is married.

How couldn't it? To take one little thing, our relationship won't be defined by visits any more. It won't be fun mini-vacations, but life where we're both working.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-27 09:40:00
Middle East and North AfricaDoubts part II
My SO and I met online, and I still don't believe you can get to know somebody well just over the internet. I don't believe I was in love with him until we had met in person. (we also talked for over a year before we met in person.) We were interested, sure, but there's so much you can't tell.

Sure, had he lied, I could have caught him in a lie, and I'm as analytical as they come. But there's tons of little things that shape my picture of him, and almost none of them are words. It's not just lust. How does he react to a slow waitress? What's his body language around my friends? How does he treat my sisters? Is he patient in traffic? Does his mood vary with his blood sugar? (maybe that's just me.) How is he around his family?

It's like a good story. The difference between telling and showing.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-26 13:40:00
Middle East and North AfricaDoubts part II

Isn't the premise of all marriage to be mutually beneficial?


Emphasis here on mutual. There are many reasons under the sun one might want to get married, and not all of them are Western-style love affairs. Nothing wrong with the idea that love can come after a marriage, either, or that a marriage can survive once love has faded. But a fraudulent marriage is hardly beneficial to the U.S.C.

The biggest flag for me is a big economic gap. This includes American-American couples, too, of course, where two people are poorly suited but are tied together via income. Saddest story I know from when I was working, girl with a 2C diamond ring, been married a month, cheats on her husband at a conference, explaining that they didn't like each other, but got married because his inheritance from his grandmother depended on his being married or some such.

But pretty much any situation where the beneficiary has so much to gain economically just by coming to the United States, while it doesn't always put me in mind of fraud, at least makes me wonder, even if both sides are sincere, on how the couple will survive once one incentive for the 'relationship' - 'he/she can get me out of here! - is gone.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-25 21:50:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
szsz, no one's bringing in numbers as anything but rough guidelines or terms of rhetoric. (I expect you know this.) You seem to want to cling to the idea that each woman's fertility is wholly individual and there are no trends or correlations at all. I'm not sure why you think this is plausible. That just doesn't seem to fit the data, nor what we would expect given anecdotal life experience.

I have a question... now I don't know much about fertility other than you have to ovulate each month and that comes with your menses and since that doesn't happen for me without the BC pill it would be really hard for me to conceive with no assistance.... if I take BC pills for a while and then go off suddenly, I get pregnant.. or at least that's what's happended twice in the past.

I have always thought (I thought I learned it in school but I could be wrong) that when a baby girl is born she comes equipped with all the eggs she'll ever have in her life... so she doesn't produce more eggs later on like chickens.
When she ovulates each month her body pushes an unfertilized egg out so she loses one if it doesn't become fertilized that month... that happens every month? (normally)
So when she's older that means she doesn't have as many eggs left so is that why she would be less fertile?

Do I have this close at all or do I seriously need to go back to grade school??? :unsure:

If this is right does that mean I'll stay fertile longer since I don't ovulate each month????


The rough picture is like this, and it's evolving as we learn more (this is not the same as saying it's absurd): A baby girl is born with lots of unfertilized pre-eggs. Lots. Once she hits puberty and starts menstruating, every month an egg ripens, and is released, blah blah, if there's a sperm, a baby, if not, a period.

Okay, so there's zillions of them lil' pre-eggs in there. Most of them die before they get a chance to be released. So infertility (as opposed to menopause) isn't caused by running out of eggs, exactly. This is where it's not as well understood, but basically, as the woman ages, everything ages, including the eggs, and the processes start to slow down. Some of the eggs are damaged genetically. This is one reason it's harder to get pregnant, they hypothesize, as most spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) are thought to be because the embyro isn't genetically viable. (Basically, the body gets rid of it if it's not working right in some cases.) Sometimes the egg doesn't release like it should. Sometimes it releases, but the uterine lining is changing and it doesn't implant. And some of these problems are linked to age.

A friend of mine who went through fertility treatment had no problem getting pregnant, but staying pregnant was a different story. Her body had a hard time producing the hormones necessary to hold onto the pregnancy. So the next time she tested positive, they gave her hormone shots for the first trimester. Worked like a charm.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 22:42:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
Got the full link? (I can get JSTOR.)

Even so, a study about demographics and fertility rates isn't the same as a study which tracks hormonal changes and egg quality with age. (NOT A BIRTH RATE.)

(Some non-technical information about the body (NOT A BIRTH RATE) changes: http://www.infertili...nfertility.html. http://www.marchofdi.../681_1155.asp.)

You seem to be arguing here that because the science isn't 100% conclusive.... that what follows from it? That we can't say anything about declining individual fertility (NOT A BIRTH RATE)? That we're going to discover that all women can have babies into their 70s, it's just that male sperm starts to suck and all the 70 year olds are married to other seventy-year-olds? That really, fertility increases and it's all just the patriarchy? I'm not sure what you're arguing here, which is partially why I've gotten a bit snarky, especially since no one is saying that assumptions won't change.

You seem to have no other reason not to trust the current research other than the fact that science is an evolving discipline. Now you may just be anti-science, and that's all well and good. But that's not a reason to reject the research as unsound, just as permanent. But again, no one's saying that the science is permanent.

(NOT A BIRTH RATE.)

It isn't enough to say 'science changes therefore you must be a permanent skeptic and believe the outliers are more likely'. But I'm not sure what you're arguing for. What do you think is the live hypothesis we're not considering here?

(WE ARE STILL NOT TALKING ABOUT BIRTH RATES.)
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 21:49:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
I thought they were like Canadians, and all Canadians know each other. Right? ('Do you know Bob? From Canada?') :)
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 21:26:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
No one said nature isn't full of surprises, but it's a mistake to go from 'here's an outlier' to 'therefore the whole trend is proved wrong!' And of course, priorities and reality don't all line up.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 21:23:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
It was an off the cuff remark after several pages of people trying to refute claims about oocytes by saying I was confused about demographic data delaying marriage and some confusion about the difference between declining fertility and a declining fertility rate.

Yes, there are outliers. But that's not really the point here. The point is it's not all that weird when you see a couple where the guy is 30 and the woman is 50 to conclude that having biological children is probably not at the top of their priority list, and it has nothing to do with not knowing when menopause is, and everything to do with it being less likely that they'll conceive without considerable time and expense.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 21:15:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
Oh, for crying out loud. I didn't make up the conversation. Here's some quotes:

I don't get it. Why would anyone assume that a woman that is 15 or 20 years older than her husband is incapable of getting pregnant? Women all over are getting pregnant at the age of 60 and older. What, does menopause start at 35 now?


I didn't take it offensively, I am just amused how younger (not necessarily you Sarah) women assume that older women are infertile. People go through menopause at many different ages, some young, some old, but to assume that everyone over a specific age shows that they really haven't done their research. Of course why would they need to at their age, it isn't a concern of theirs, I am aware of that.


My husband never expected to even be able to marry, much less get to have children. At 38, as a poor man, he didn't see either of those opportunities in his future. He accepted that to have a wife and no kids was better than no wife and no kids. Even now that we've agreed to try after I graduate, he still isn't so sure he wants kids at our age. I'll be 47 then and he'll be 42. He really wants to start trying now, but I refuse until I am close enough to graduation that I can graduate before the baby is born. This time if I have a baby I want to be able to enjoy it. Work takes enough of my time, I don't want work and school and a baby.
...

At first I was skeptical about having a baby so old, but a friend at work helped me with that. She's in her 50s and just sent me the pictures of her latest adventure - skydiving. She also owns her own Harley Davidson and has been riding it for years. When I mentioned kids to her, she told me about a friend of hers who has a 3 year old, and she's in her mid 50s. She had the baby when she was about 52 and it's perfectly normal. She loves to remind me that you don't stop living as you age, and even babies can be a part of that life.


Now, both of the women who posted undoubtedly know their own situations, and are working with their doctors. Hence why I didn't quote them originally, because I didn't want to respond to their specific situations and unintentionally give offense.

But I didn't make up the conversation, and my only point when I posted was to point out that there's more of a factor than just menopause when considering fertility decline. This isn't controversial, really. It's not a demographic study. It isn't that they did a study on men and ported it to women (which happens all too often with some studies, especially heart research.) This is pretty much state-of-the-art, and it struck me as odd to hear of 'women in their 60s give birth all over now', when that doesn't seem to be accurate. Never said the science was perfect, but again, not going to bet that we become mistaken about the general shape of the fertility arc, and yes, we're not going to see 55-year-olds becoming pregnant on their own as a matter of course. Bet ya $5.

In terms of the larger discussion, it's not crazy to think that someone in their late forties absent fertility treatments, for all intents and purposes, is likely past her child-bearing years. This bears on the rest of the discussion about the importance or unimportance of children, family, adjustments, etc.

I don't think I have anything more to say about this, really.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 20:52:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
That wasn't the point at all. The point was when people are saying 'why should age matter if he wants a lot of kids, because menopause doesn't happen till I'm fifty', people should be aware that as far as science knows now, fertility begins to decline well before menopause. It doesn't draw conclusions about any one individual, but let me bet that I am more likely to get pregnant than my (dear, vibrant, active) 50-year-old mother.

There's tons of factors. Age and gender are pretty big ones, as older women have a harder time conceiving and men can't get pregnant, last I checked. (of course, I may just be trusting the data too much on that.) Doesn't mean a relationship isn't real, or that the woman isn't worthwhile.

I didn't realize that would be such a controversial point, as its received wisdom among most of the people I know, which includes a few people who have received fertility treatments and a couple of doctors.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 18:49:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
Sure, there could be surprises. I'm going to bet though, that finding that a forty-seven year old woman has experienced no significant decline in fertility compared to her twenty-two year old self, is one of those findings we are probably unlikely to find overwhelming evidence to the contrary on.

The sample sizes are small, but that can be said of all research. Point is, best research we have points to thus-and-such facts, that are, I stress, not demographic studies, but biological factors. We don't have all the answers worked out, and probably some assumptions will turn out to be wrong.

But I don't think we'll see tons of women naturally conceiving children at 55 any time soon.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 18:31:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
There are reasons to think that they're not just stupidly looking at declining birth rates and concluding that women's fertility drops. (The fact they're charting hormone levels, measuring uterine linings, postulating why oocytes fail to mature is one.) The research is out there. Is it perfect and enduring for all time? No. Is it a safe bet that women's fertility declines after a certain age, but before menopause? Pretty much.

These are all completely separate questions from the availability of birth control, the decline of the birth rate in Western nations, or women's growing economic status. Does it mean we all have to get married at 22? Hell no. But that doesn't mean that there aren't hormone changes before perimenopause that can affect fertility.

One reason we do know what we do is due to success and failure in fertility treatments. It's a big, expensive process, and there's a lot of incentive to figure out what works best for the patients, and that's driven a lot of the research, to figure out why what works in a 30 year old doesn't work in a 45 year old.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 17:57:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
O goodness. Triplets are SO NOT HAPPENING. :lol: Six little feet kicking my bladder? I think not!
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 16:26:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
We'll take what we get, but six probably isn't happening if we start when I'm 28.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 16:18:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
My fiancé's cousin has five children, all under the age of 9. He jokes that we'll have to have six, 'just to beat Karmon.'

(me: 'This isn't a competition, but you can have a few if you want to try to catch up.' ;) )
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 16:10:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
I'm not even seeing how I said you were, VP! (I only said 'sometimes' twice, I know.)

I'm 27, too. Hoping to start a family once he's here, and we're settled and he has a green card.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 16:04:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?

How are you defining fertility? By the ability to conceive, or by the number of births to women of a certain age?

Also, is anyone looking at factors that can impact fertility, like the fact that so many women start using birth control by their mid 20s and don't choose to have children until their 30s, so stay on the pill all that time. There is some evidence to support that being on the pill for an extended period of time can decrease fertility.


I am defining 'fertility' here to mean 'ability to conceive and bear a child.' This is different from the sense of fertility used to track fertility rates.

Sometimes women have a hard time conceiving as they come off the pill, but it hasn't been conclusively linked to permanent infertility. (Basically, it sometimes takes a few months for your body to start ovulating again as your ovaries re-assert themselves.)
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 15:58:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?

Caladan,

I agree with your first point, however I wonder what profession you are in when reading your second point.

I am 44. In July I had exploratory laparoscopy and while my doctor (OBGYN) was in there looking around I asked him to look at my tubes to see if they were a good candidate to be "untied". He looked and even gave me a full-color picture of them (anybody wanna see!?) :P and told me that they look great. He said he will recommend me to a specialist when I'm ready to have them untied. When I mentioned to him that we would probably wait a couple of years he only stressed that the older I get the riskier it gets that the child will have birth defects, but mentioned none of the other things you talk about.

I had my tubes tied when I was 23, and the doctor that did it back then told me that it could put me into early menopause. When I told my current doctor that, he said that was nonsense. He's been my doctor now since about 1992, and has been recognized as one of the best in his field in this city. I think there can be a lot of misinformation floating around and each woman should talk to her own doctor instead of listening to what she hears on here.


I am not a doctor. And you're absolutely right that each woman should check with her doctor, as individuals vary.

But there's still a difference between 'menopause' and 'declining fertility', and those are fairly well-documented. (scholar.google it... gets you to peer-reviewed research. Might need to be on a university server for it, though. Webmd has several articles on it, too.) Rough guideline -- and OB/GYNs consider this -- is 35 for a 'decline.' What that decline translates to depends heavily on the rest of woman's genetics, but the decline is there.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 15:53:00
Middle East and North AfricaMore kids with second marriage?
Couple points:

1) There's a difference between noting or understanding that an age gap is unusual for a culture and endorsing the mindset that goes behind it. I could explain the mindset of a 12th-century monk without endorsing it, and I could use it to predict his behavior. I could learn about what motivates a serial killer, and use that knowledge to lay a trap for him. Same sort of thing here. I don't have to believe that young pure women are highly valued in order to recognize that it's important in some cultures.


2) While it's true that menopause doesn't happen till much later in life, fertility starts to decline much sooner. My mom, for example, is still only perimenopausal at age 50, but started having problems with her pregnancies at age 33. Celebrity women still pump out babies in their late forties and fifties, but it's probably worth keeping mind that there's a fair amount of assisted reproductive therapies going on. The rough line is around 35 for peak fertility. It all depends on the individual after that, but it's just not true that a 47 year old woman is just as fertile as a 22 year old.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 15:07:00
Middle East and North Africamore on age differences
I'm 27, so dating someone too much younger is out of the question. Legally, I could date an 18 year old, but they'd be boring as all get-out and annoying naïve.

I think 20 years would be too much, but I could probably date 15 years older than I am (just based on men I've been attracted to.) Still, I'd worry about long-term compatibility, just because his life experience would be so much greater than mine I think it would be hard to grow. What would be a crisis to me would be old hat to him.

When I was 22, dating someone who was thirty would have been out of the question, for much the same reasons. Not enough in common. The range seems to widen as one ages.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-29 18:26:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
Where 'clarity' is defined as 'abandoning all pretense of logic and reason.'
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 15:20:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
Fry bigot.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 15:05:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
How is someone not sharing your preference an insult?
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 14:51:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal


All this poll would show, were it composes clearly, is that mixed race marriages, mixed faith marriages, and mixed age marriages evoke different moral intuitions. The cases aren't analogous enough to draw any relevant conclusions.

Who died and made you Zogby?


I dunno. Who's zogby?
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 14:03:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
All this poll would show, were it composes clearly, is that mixed race marriages, mixed faith marriages, and mixed age marriages evoke different moral intuitions. The cases aren't analogous enough to draw any relevant conclusions.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 14:00:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
charles, that's awesome. It's like bowling! For dentures!
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 13:55:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
I think we're confusing 'older-younger relationships are gross' with 'I wouldn't date anyone 20 years older than I am.'
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 13:47:00
Middle East and North AfricaRace mixing is gross and abnormal
I'm not sure I understand what the poll is asking.

Oh, is this supposed to be where someone says, no, it's not appropriate, and then we all say 'Oh, but you said that different ages dating was gross!' 'hypocrite, hypocrite!' and we all jump around and throw things at each other like monkeys and you try to prove a point about something or other?
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 13:42:00
Middle East and North Africatuesday thread
I love the juxtaposition of the real dog and the dog on the skirt. And the pink. What a great costume! (And a cute kid.)
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 17:35:00
Middle East and North Africatuesday thread
Cool article. Still not the case that Halloween = All Saint's Day. One I get candy, the other I have to go to church.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 13:45:00
Middle East and North Africatuesday thread
All Saint's Day is November 1st. It doesn't really have anything to do directly with Halloween, at least not to the extent that celebrating Halloween is a Catholic thing.

It's just that depending on the version of the story you read, as some of the pagans converted to Christianity, and as the Catholic feast day happened to be near the old holiday Samhain, the old holiday became 'All Hallows' Eve.' (i.e., the night before All Saints' Day.) Quite a lot of the history of Christianity is modifying old festivals for new purposes (whether intentionally or not).

But All Saints' Day doesn't have anything to do with trick-or-treating, or devil worship, or the all-important mini candy bars. :) As far as the Church is concerned, Hallowe'en's just a day for kids to dress up and get candy.
CaladanMaleCanada2006-10-31 13:23:00