Getting My VLS-TS Vie Privée et Familiale
The journey begins
Plenty of cautionary tales and horror stories exist around the subject of immigration. As you sink deeper into the expat process, you hear lots of anecdotes about visa complications, denials, and so on.
Reading all that stuff made me a little nervous before applying for my spouse visa, more accurately known as the “Family and private life” visa, for France.
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. I had an appointment in New York at the beginning of April 2024. Eight days later, I received a tracking notice from FedEx that a package was on its way from the French Embassy in DC. The next day, I had my passport and visa in hand.
This is how things went.
Submitting the Application and Making the Appointment
A few years ago, France outsourced the visa processing, uh, process to a private company, VFS Global. Maybe that has streamlined things, maybe not. What I can tell you is that the application and appointment making component was the most frustrating part of the whole thing.
For starters, I needed to fill out an application over on the French Visas website. The application asked for basic information, like my name, current address, spouse’s name, address in France, employment situation and so on.
Folks, I managed to mess up the application! But more on that later.
Once you fill out the application, but before submitting it, you need to go over to the VFS website and make an appointment with them to actually hand in your paperwork and get fingerprinted.
But before you can make that appointment, you need to receive a single-use code, either through email or text. For whatever reason, I had the hardest time getting the code. At first, it would arrive 10, 15 minutes after the request, too late to be valid.
Then, it stopped arriving at all, until HOURS later. I refreshed the page, I tried using a VPN so it would think I was in France (don’t know why I thought that would work), I switched to Firefox, I tried using my phone. I googled, and found that this is a common situation.1 Often, the best thing to do is just wait.
Finally, around 6 or 7 pm, I tried again. And got the code!
But, when I got to the appointment page, all that was there was a blank page, even though the previous screen had said there were appointments from the beginning of April.
🤦♀️
So I waited and tried again the next day. Finally, I was able to get through and book an appointment. The VLS-TS vie privee et familiale is free (you have to pay for other visa types), but I ended up having to pay $27 and change for the privilege (?) of working with VFS, plus $35 for the courier and $12 for my visa photo (which was cheaper than going locally). So $75-ish total.
I went back over to the French Visas page, confirmed that I had made my appointment, and submitted my application.
Now the fun began. Once I submitted the application, I realized that in the “Prenom” section, instead of my name, Amy, it read “Pennsylvania.”
My guess is that Chrome’s auto-fill feature stuck in “Pennsylvania” rather than my first name, because why on earth would I make that mistake.
I panicked, and considered canceling my visa appointment, since the appointment is supposedly attached to your application number. But, I’d already paid the fees and didn’t want to lose them.
What I did instead was send their help desk an email, explaining the situation. I was sure I’d never get a reply. Then, I created a new application, with my name in the correct spot, and submitted that.
That instinct was correct, as a few days later, I got a reply from VFS telling me to just complete a new application and bring that, plus the messed up one, to the appointment.
Why the French Visas website makes such a deal about not submitting your application before you have an appointment, I don’t know. Because Amy F and Pennsylvania F both have visa applications submitted.
The Documents Needed
For other types of visas, you apparently need to bring a million and a half documents. That’s not the case for the spouse visa.
As long as you’re a US citizen, married to a French person, and you got married in France, you only need to bring (as of 2024):
Your passport
Your application and the receipt from the visas website
A “recent” copy of your marriage certificate (more on this below)
A copy of your spouse’s passport or other proof of their French nationality
I brought both applications with me, plus a copy of the email from the VFS help desk. The person who took all my paperwork didn’t care about any of that. She just confirmed that I had the correct application before proceeding.
About that “recent” copy of your marriage certificate. That’s as specific as the French Visas website got. When we got married in 2023, the mairie gave us a bunch of copies of the certificate. But, since they were nearly one year old, I was worried they wouldn’t be valid any more.
It’s easy enough to request a new copy, though, either by emailing the mairie or making a request online. I think in bigger cities, the online request process is pretty straightforward. But we got married in a tiny village, so email was the way to go.
I got a new copy of the marriage certificate, with a March date on it. As it turned out, the person who took my documents didn’t speak French, and wasn’t really sure what to make of the certificate anyway.
You can still qualify for the spouse visa if you’re married to a French person, but you didn’t get married in France. I think you need to have your marriage recorded in France first, and I’m not sure how that works. I also don’t know if you’ll need additional documents when you apply for the VLS-TS.
Also, I hear people mention needing their Livret de famille when applying for the visa. For me, that wasn’t the case. I also didn’t have to provide proof of health insurance. Again, I applied from the U.S. in 2024. The process may differ in the future or in another country. Just getting all my disclaimers in.
The Appointment
My appointment was scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon on a rainy day. I took the train up to New York, had a nice lunch, dropped my mari off at the public library, and headed over to VFS Global.
The atmosphere at the visa application office was “classic DMV.” Rows of plastic chairs in the waiting area, screens that display the current number being helped and the desk at which they are being helped, a general sense of annoyance/desperation.
VFS processes visas for multiple counties, so it wasn’t just people hoping to go to France waiting there. However, it was primarily people hoping to go to France. A lot of them were applying for short-term visas, which, I can’t imagine having to go through the hassle just for a five-day visit.
I don’t know why, but I thought that having a 2:30 appointment meant that I had a 2:30 appointment.
I thought I’d be in and out in 15, maybe 30 minutes tops.
Ha, innocent me.
More accurately, it meant I got to sit in the waiting room for over an hour, watching all the other people get called up to the counter, before my number was called.
The checklist provided when I booked the appointment made a big deal about not bringing any bags into the visa center, so I left mine with my husband and didn’t think to bring a book with me. So during that hour plus wait, all I had was my phone and eavesdropping on other people to occupy my time. Plenty of other people had bags, too, so I don’t think the “no bags” rule was actually enforced.
🤦♀️
Finally, it was my turn. As I mentioned above, the clerk didn’t care about my application mistake and simply took the correct one from me. She then asked for my passport and a copy of my spouse’s. I had brought both the real deal and the photocopy of his passport with me, but she didn’t even ask to see the real thing.
Then she asked for the marriage certificate, and that’s where things got a little wonky. I had assumed that the clerks would speak French, but she didn’t, and she didn’t really seem to understand why the certificate had a March 2024 date on it. She asked me when I got married, and I said the date, which made her make a face.
She got up to ask someone about it, then came back and I guess it was fine, because she asked if I had any other documents to share. I didn’t, so she gave me my receipt, had me sign something, then told me that I had to wait for biometrics.
Biometrics
Biometrics is a fancy way to say they took my fingerprints and photo. The last time I got fingerprinted was in kindergarten and it involved a stamp pad, so I was a little worried I’d be leaving the visa center with ink all over my fingers.
Luckily, times, and technology, have changed. They use a scanner to capture your fingerprints, so no inky fingers. I think there was also supposed to be a camera attached to the fingerprint scanner, but it was broken, so the clerk just used a regular camera to take my photo.
It’s not the best picture, but it’s not terrible, and now I have five extra copies of it. Actually, of all the ID photos I’ve had taken since my move, it’s the best one. I wish I hadn’t left those five extras in the U.S.
While she took my photo, she asked if I was married to a French or an Italian, which did not make me feel at ease, at first. Was my file about to get mixed up with someone else’s?
Then I figured maybe it was a test, to confirm that I wasn’t in a scam marriage. She also asked if we got married in the US or in France. Okay, if these are tests to verify the legitimacy of the marriage, maybe they need to work a bit harder. Maybe ask me what color my spouse’s eyes are?
After having me sign another piece of paper (and scolding me because she didn’t think I had read it thoroughly enough), she sent me on my way.
A little after 4:30, I was out the door.
The Visa Arrives
As I was leaving the appointment, I got an email that my visa was submitted for processing, followed quickly by an email stating that it had been dispatched to the embassy.
Then, two days later, I got an email stating that my visa application was received.
I guess everything went well, because I didn’t hear anything until I got the FedEx notification eight days later.
Since they overnight your passport to you, it wasn’t long before FedEx was ringing the doorbell, asking me to sign for the package.
And the visa was in my hands.
Now, the next steps were to arrive in France and validate it. Stay tuned.
I’m just gonna say that French websites not working as they should is an all too common experience.
So much red tape! I laughed at the part about the inky fingers!