I'll be spending Valentine's Day without my wife because of the UK's immigration laws

I have made Britain my home since I fled from Afghanistan when I was a child, but the Home Office's minimum income requirement stops me from bringing my non-European wife into the country

Lots of people have a mantra, a phrase that sustains them through the tough times. Some people repeat a string of positive adjectives to themselves in the mirror every morning before they leave the house, a kind of psychological warpaint to set them up for the day. Mine, though, isn’t a phrase but a number: 18,600.

As I eat breakfast, I think of the number 18,600. While I shower, I think of 18,600. Even when I’m shaving, getting ready for university, I’m calculating how many hours I’ve worked this month, worrying about whether it will be enough to bring me up to that magic number.

So why am I so obsessed with this figure? You’d have to ask the Home Office. Because it’s the minimum income requirement needed for me to bring my non-European wife over from Afghanistan to also build a life with me in the UK.

I fled to Britain from Afghanistan when I was still a child, travelling alone to find safety and build a new life. Now, years later, I’ve managed to do that. I stopped wondering long ago whether the UK was my home – my friends are here, my work is here, my future is here.

But while I’m desperate to live here with the person I love, I also want to work towards a better future, for me and for us, so I’m pursuing further education. As a mature student, studying international relations at one of London’s most prestigious universities, it seems almost impossible to meet that minimum income requirement.

That’s why alongside my studies, I work as a legal adviser and at a supermarket. Every day I ask myself how many hours I’ll be working, and whether I could possibly work any more. I’ve worked shifts between lectures at uni and done full weeks of double shifts at the supermarket in the holidays while I try and cram in my reading for uni. I wish there were nine days in a week – but sadly there’s only seven, and I just can’t see how it will ever be enough.

I don’t blame people who don’t understand what it means to have to meet this threshold. But for anyone who can’t work full-time for whatever reason, their family life is on the line because of this policy, which affects British citizens and refugees alike.

My friends say I must be a robot – they don’t understand how I keep going. But I have no choice. My education and my marriage are equally important to me – my wife is my future, but so are my studies. That’s why I’ve not slept properly in three years. I’ve been killing myself to make it work, feeling guilty any moment of the day that I’m not either working or studying. And through it all is the constant worry about my wife’s safety in Afghanistan.

Of course, we all know how it feels to worry about our loved ones. But when your wife lives in a warzone, that feeling is indescribable. How can I explain what it’s like to be on the phone to your wife and hear an earth-shattering bang, followed by her screams?

Last year, while she was on the way to take one of the many tests required for a spouse visa, a suicide bomber struck just metres away from her. Her screams down the line stay with me to this day.

How could I comfort her over the phone as she showed me the devastation all around her? How could my words of reassurance ever replace the hug she needed after seeing people ripped to pieces right in front of her and she narrowly escaped meeting the same fate?

As Valentine’s Day looms, I know that love is in the air for lots of people.

But for me and my wife, every day we’ve spent apart feels like a Valentine’s Day that’s passed us by. Every day we’re left wondering what this day would have been like if we could be together. Every day that I spend loving my wife is a kind of Valentine’s Day – one we’ve missed out on.

After all my struggles with the Home Office, I now finally have permanent status and a hope of some stability. But there’s one last hoop to jump through – getting to live here with the person I love.

Ali Hamidi is writing under a pseudonym