You met online. You talk every day. You have not been in the same room yet, or you have but it was a while ago.
This is the requirement that decides whether the fiancé visa is available to you at all, and it is worth understanding precisely rather than approximately.
One thing to keep in view while you read it. The fiancé route is not the faster route. It is the narrower one, and the narrowing falls on your fiancé rather than on you. You make the choice. They live inside its limits.
The Requirement
The petitioner and the fiancé must have met in person within the two years immediately before the petition is filed.
Two parts to that, and both are load-bearing.
In person. Video calls, messages, and years of daily contact do not satisfy it, however real the relationship is.
Within two years of filing. A meeting from five years ago does not carry forward. The window runs backward from the filing date, which means it can close while a couple waits to file.
That second part catches people. A couple who met in person, then spent three years apart building the relationship remotely, may have aged out of a requirement they already satisfied once.
The Waiver, Stated Correctly
A waiver exists. Most pages describe it imprecisely, and the imprecision matters.
The statute gives the government discretion to waive the meeting requirement. It lists no grounds at all.
The two grounds everyone quotes come from the regulation, at 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(k)(2):
- Compliance would result in extreme hardship to the petitioner.
- Compliance would violate strict and long-established customs of the fiancé’s foreign culture or social practice.
Why the distinction is not academic. A page that says the statute provides those two grounds is telling you the law is narrower and more fixed than it is. The reality is that the discretion is broad and the regulation supplies the two recognized routes into it. That is a different conversation with an attorney.
What the Waiver Is Not
It is not a hardship-to-the-couple standard. The first ground is hardship to the petitioner, the U.S. citizen. Not to the fiancé, and not to the relationship.
That asymmetry runs through this whole route. The requirements are measured on you. The consequences land on them.
It is not a general “we could not afford to travel” exception. Cost alone is not what that ground is built for.
And it is discretionary. Meeting a ground does not entitle anyone to the waiver.
We are not going to tell you whether you qualify for one. That determination depends on facts and it is not a page’s to make.
The Practical Advice Almost Nobody Gives
If you can travel and meet, travel and meet.
A waiver request is a harder case than a clean filing, it adds a discretionary decision to a case that did not need one, and the couples who succeed on waivers are usually the ones who genuinely could not travel.
If travel is possible but inconvenient, that is a strong reason to make it happen rather than a reason to look for the waiver.
Keep evidence of the visit. Boarding passes, stamps, photographs with dates, hotel records. The requirement is not just that you met. It is that you can show it.
If your case is weak, you hear it from us first. If there is risk, you know before anything is filed. If there is a path, you get a plan built around it.
Find Out Where You Stand on This One
If you have met and are within the window, this requirement is a documentation question. If you have not, it is a strategy question, and it should be answered before anything is filed.
Talk it through with a bilingual team member. Bring the dates of any visits and whatever you kept from them.
Law Office of Gilda McDowell. Serving families across West Texas and eastern New Mexico.
This page explains a requirement in general terms. It is not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Whether a waiver is available in your case is a determination for an attorney. Everything here was verified against the primary sources on August 28, 2026.