My Wife Is a Filipina

My Wife Is a Filipina
By Simon Lysdahlgaard
An unforgettable true story of love, visas, and the quiet rebellion of building a life together across continents.
When Simon, a Danish researcher rooted in the cold routines of academia, swipes right on Tinder, he has no idea he's about to fall into the most unpredictable, passionate, and bureaucratically complicated adventure of his life.
Athina, a Filipina with a career at high-end resorts in the Maldives, is just "traveling Europe" when they match. Their first meeting in Singapore feels like a movie-awkward, magical, full of laughter and jetlag. From there, their love story spans the globe: Vietnamese street food tours, desert safaris in Abu Dhabi, and chaotic Manila Christmases. Along the way come the harder parts too-visa rejections, Danish immigration bureaucracy, cultural misunderstandings, deep-seated prejudice, and a pregnancy that arrives just in time to complicate everything even more.
But this memoir isn't just about love. It's about what happens when love meets reality. It's about trying to raise a family while jumping through the flaming hoops of Western immigration systems. It's about learning how to install a bidet, use a Filipino tabo, and rejoin the Danish church just to make your wife feel at home. It's about karaoke, fastelavnsboller, and whether being Asian means you're good at cleaning (spoiler: it doesn't).
Written with disarming honesty and a sharp eye for both cultural nuance and absurdity, My Wife Is a Filipina explores what it means to truly integrate-not just administratively, but emotionally. It's a raw and often hilarious reflection on race, love, power, and how two people from wildly different worlds try to build a home in the narrow spaces allowed by law and tradition.
Whether you're in an international relationship, wrestling with immigration systems, or just a sucker for heartfelt stories grounded in real life, this memoir is for you.
This is not a love story. This is what happens after the love story begins.