Mabuhay Love

By Jonathan Gonzalez

A tale of young love and adventure in a place far from home; Jonathan flew to the Philippines to experience true love and have an experience of a lifetime. At 25, heavy in debt and looking for a new life he decided to do something daring. He bought a round trip ticket to the Philippines to meet a woman he met online. They where the best of friends and things were progressing and he thought it was enough to conquer his fear in a land he's never been to, to meet someone he only knew online with the hopes and dreams that everything would turn out well. They shared their first kiss on Valentine’s Day and it has been bliss ever since.

Share in a true story of overcoming the odds and conquering your fear for an experience of a lifetime. This book was written to share our story of love and how anyone can do the same thing. I went through a few scams and heart breaks before finding true love. Perseverance and faith in something better will only come if you step out of your comfort zone and go after your dreams!

If you really want to find someone special, you need to be willing to fly to the ends of the world to be with them. I literally did this and have no regrets. I wrote this story to share my wonderful experiences in a country I had never been to. I will provide insight to those looking to do the same thing. Are you looking to find a wonderful Filipina woman to marry and fall in love with? Love the thrill and enjoyment of Philippine culture? I will give you an inside look into a slice of Philippine life.

I hope you enjoy this book, I wrote it while deployed to Kuwait on my off time. I'm looking forward to writing a second book in this series which details our wedding and hopefully provide valuable information for those looking to get married to a Filipina woman and going through the process of getting a visa and everything needed. I will also include travel guides and useful information for those wanting to travel to the Philippines for the first time, it's a wonderful country. Thanks for reading, Salamat!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Gonzalez
• Release date: Aug 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476371757

Jonathan Gonzalez

Hello all, my name is Jonathan. I'm fairly new to writing books although writing is something I tend to enjoy. I figured I type enough as is, why not try to publish a book? So that's what I did. I'm hoping to have quite a few books under my belt, my current and first one being "Mabuhay Love". It's a story about how I met my soon to be wife in the Philippines. I hope you enjoy reading my book! I will be writing a few more within the year, one being a follow up to Mabuhay Love in which I describe my second trip to the Philippines to get married. That one will be published late January 2013 or early February. So a little about me now, I am 26 and currently reside in Las Vegas. I'm in the military and have lived in South Korea and Japan. I've done plenty in my life and will continue to push forward into new territory. My day job is working in IT from system administration to network infrastructure. I love computers and I also love game design. I will be publishing a number of game design books within a year. I love "green" products of all sorts and I'm sort of a new age hippie without the long hair or beard. I currently run a blog called at burningtoday.com that details goals I want to accomplish in my life and my journey in accomplishing them. It's what led me to writing a book. I like to share inspiration and daily life with others and hope to bring smiles and motivation.

Book preview

Mabuhay Love

By Jonathan Gonzalez

Copyright © 2012 Jonathan Gonzalez

Smashwords Edition

Dedicated to my lovely wife to be who has shown me that there are still wonderful people in this world worth the sacrifice.

I love you Melanie

Table of Contents

Humble Beginnings

The Scam Artist

A Simple Friendship

The Arrival

Cultural Differences

The Jeepney and Rain

Laughter is the Best Medicine

The Longest Day

Tagaytay

New Friends

Happy Monthsary

The Rings

It’s All Relative

A Proposal

Mine Forever Forever Mine

Bittersweet Love

A Quiet Morning

Words of Wisdom

Preface

Thank you for purchasing this book! I initially had the idea to post this story throughout my blog, but once I realized I had written five pages with just the intro I knew I wanted to make it into a book. My blog (burningtoday.com) has a list of goals, and one was to publish a book and another was to get married. So this further fueled my pursuit of creating my first book with this story. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. I wrote it while I was deployed to Kuwait during my free time.

I have to admit I owe it all to Melanie. It was because of her that I finally wrote this story out. She had always pushed me to write our love story and I started soon after I returned from the Philippines but it stayed on my hard drive and after weeks I just got preoccupied with other things. I started my blog, then quickly realized how much I like to write and decided this would be a great way to please Melanie and show others a wonderful experience we had together and continue to do so. She and I have overcome a lot of things together and we’re still in love and soon to be married in December.

I hope this story will give you hope and maybe even make you smile that there is always a way if you really want to find someone special in your life. I did what I had to do to find that special someone in my life and it paid off. Thank you for reading, and please let me know what you think at my blog.

Humble Beginnings

In February of this year, on Valentine’s Day of all days, I did something that most people wouldn’t risk doing. I did it because I wanted to take that leap of faith required if you really want something bad enough. That leap of faith could have literally killed me had it gone wrong, but in the end it was worth every bit and then some.

So let’s go back to the beginning, and maybe even further past that. It all started after I had failed out of my Flight Engineer course flying on helicopters for the US Air Force. This was a blessing in disguise, but also a low point in my life wondering what I would do next. I was engaged to a Japanese woman that I fell in love with while stationed in Northern Japan (Misawa) and truth be told, things weren’t sizzling between us. We got along great in person, but it was more of a really close friendship with benefits than anything else. I should also mention that 90% of our relationship was long distance.

When I lived in Japan we were 5 hours away, then I was sent back to the US and had to deal with the 15-hour time difference. So suffice it to say on Thanksgiving of 2010 she left me an email saying I think we should break up, we don’t have the same love anymore. I was at home on leave at the time, and this was a kick to the face, but one I saw coming. Unlike before, I wasn’t sad or upset; I was actually a bit relieved to move on again. After all, she was right, the love wasn’t there anymore and we had drifted apart over time. All being said she was a great woman, but definitely not for me.

I met her on Japan Cupid, which was an online dating site aimed at Japanese people. So in my quest to find someone new, I went again online to find someone I could truly fall in love with. I was never one to like home grown women from the states, as odd as that sounds, but I found it easier to talk to women overseas. I also tend to have a pretty big infatuation with Asian women so that’s probably the main reason. Unfortunately in my desperation I ended up attracting the sharks ready to pounce on someone like me.

The Scam Artist

She was beautiful, sweet and everything I could hope for. She said all the right things and knew how to pull me in. Considering we had just met, I should have known it was a trap. After building rapport, a sob story came across on how she wanted to complete her final test but needed $150 in order to pay for it. I don’t know why, but I fell for it and sent her the money.

Playing along, she said she passed her test and expressed gratitude for helping her. It felt good to help her out. She went further and decided to test the waters yet again. She asked for $100 to help her with food, as she just spent all her money and couldn’t afford to eat. Once again, I opened my wallet to her to help her out.

I thought she was incredibly beautiful and knew what she was doing. She sent me new photos of a party she attended and other pictures with her family. She included a sweet one of her hugging her cute five-year-old cousin. She had me reeled in. Eventually I ended up paying her rent, which was another $300. Keeping score? That’s $525 sent to her without as much as a phone call or video chat to reveal whom she really was. She said she didn’t have a home computer, and the Internet café she was at didn’t have cameras or microphones. I thought that was weird and just about every Filipina woman I spoke with raised the bullshit flag. I convinced myself that I wasn’t getting scammed.

Eventually things progressed with us and she said she talked to a company that dealt with VISAs and that they had a package deal that if we got the VISA and the plane tickets through them it would only cost $800 total. Gee, that’s awesome! Let’s do it! If I could go back in time and smack myself in the face I would. I had never been fooled so easily, but love makes you do crazy things.

I even had her signed up as a guest to arrive for my Airman Leadership School of which I was the class leader. I was beaming from ear to ear knowing that my lovely woman was coming soon. It wasn’t soon after I sent the money for the plane tickets and VISA package that she suddenly stopped showing up online. No replies to messages, nothing. At first I was worried, then angry, then sad. I cried when the realization set in that she took me for a ride, but the thing that hurt me the most was that she didn’t love me.

Still to this day I have no clue if she was who she said she was, in my desperation to see her and talk to her, I sent her a netbook that I was no longer using. She then claimed that she didn’t have internet access to use the computer. This should have chimed me in that she was using me. To throw salt on the wounds, she came back accusing me of not sticking around. The nerve of some people, I kindly told her to screw off and never to talk to me again. She came back in a different form later on.

Even after being burned pretty bad