Thailand stories about foreigners and Thai women in Bangkok and other areas of Thailand.
At 52 I flew to Thailand to meet Chompoo, my Messenger girlfriend, in person, more suspicious than excited. Between money requests, a gold bracelet, and an itemised bill for picking me up at the airport, I nearly booked a flight back to Auckland. One simple test, asking for my money back, changed everything I thought about her.
Freshly divorced, I flew to Bangkok with a fake forty-dollar Rolex bought on a New York layover. Between bar nights and a reserved woman who set one strange condition for seeing her again, the trip left me two nights I'll never forget, a lesson in misplaced trust, and no plans to bring the real watch next time.
In 2005, heartbroken and with a student loan installment just paid out, I spent a week in Bangkok trying to drink the pain away. I went back nine more times in my early twenties. On one of those trips, in Koh Samui, I met the woman I now live with in England, and with whom I have two daughters.
At 39, an Australian who considered himself a seasoned Thailand traveller met a girl over a game of pool in a Pattaya bar. Ten perfect days, a golf tournament in Indonesia, visits to her family in Isaan. All good until six months of distance for work uncovered that the Scottish boyfriend she said she'd left had never actually gone anywhere.
Ryan, a 38-year-old American, has been living in Phuket with his Thai girlfriend for almost a year when her younger sister asks him a question that leaves him speechless: why did her sister find him first. Behind the question is something he never expected to learn about this family.
At 55, after a quiet divorce, a man opens a profile on TrueMatchAsia with no real expectations. There he meets a 27-year-old Thai woman he talks to almost daily for months, until he flies to Bangkok to meet her in person. A story about what actually holds a relationship together when nobody's watching the numbers.
For a few hours, a 62-year-old American felt like the most interesting man in the room. It took him a while to see what was really behind it.
A 41-year-old British man went in two weeks from a Soi 4 fling to talking dowry and house renovations. He almost sent 400,000 baht. He did not.
A Canadian sailor has been married nine years to a woman from Pattaya and has three kids. Now he faces the hardest question of his life: stay or leave.
At 70 he became a widower after forty-three years of marriage. His daughter booked him a flight to Koh Samui that gave him back what he thought was lost.