She called it being her boyfriend. Over time I realised I was actually her sponsor, one of several.

My name is Ian, I'm American, and I recently retired at 65. Since then I've spent a fair amount of time watching Thailand content online, videos of people talking about their trips and their relationships out there, and it's brought back a story I lived through with a Thai woman years ago now, well before the pandemic.

Before retiring I worked all over the world in tech, month-long projects in one country and then another, and at one point I was married to a Japanese woman. We had a child together, but the marriage ended after five years, for reasons that don't matter much anymore. The divorce hit me pretty hard financially, lawyers on both sides of the Pacific and a house I had to sell for less than it was worth, and I came out of it certain I'd never marry again, whatever happened afterwards.

For the years that followed I dated casually and enjoyed my freedom without complicating things too much, in absolutely no rush to repeat anything even resembling a marriage. While working in China, mostly in Shanghai, I met plenty of independent women with their own careers and their own lives already sorted out, and I never had any serious issues with any of them. Thailand, honestly, wasn't even on my radar back then, just a holiday destination colleagues at the office mentioned every now and again.

That changed when I was in Hong Kong, about two years before the pandemic, on another work project that ran longer than planned. One night, in my hotel bar, I met two Thai women who also seemed to be passing through the city. One of them was called Pom. She spoke excellent English, far better than my Mandarin after years there, we got along well from the very first moment, and before long we were spending several nights in a row together before my trip ended and each of us went back to our own life. I remember asking her, half joking, what two Thai women were doing alone in a Hong Kong hotel bar, and she laughed and told me I could ask myself the same question, which struck me as clever at the time and now, looking back, just seems like an elegant way of not answering anything at all.

When I got back to the US, Pom and I stayed in touch through video calls almost every day, something that genuinely surprised me at the time since I hadn't expected any of it to continue past the airport. She invited me to visit her in Bangkok, and with nothing tying me down at that point in my life, no fixed job waiting and nobody to explain myself to, I booked the flight almost without thinking twice.

When I arrived, Pom was waiting for me at the airport with a smile I recognised instantly from our video calls. She lived in a modern apartment in Bangkok, with views over the city that struck me as pretty impressive for what I'd been expecting to find. We spent ten days together, mostly her showing me around the city, markets I'd never have found on my own, eating out most nights, enjoying our time together without thinking much beyond that particular moment. One night she took me to a night market she said almost no tourists knew about, and I spent the evening trying dishes I couldn't even name while she haggled prices in Thai with an ease that left me feeling completely useless and charmed at the same time. By the time I left, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't already falling for her, with the same ridiculous intensity you fall for someone at twenty, except I was no longer twenty and had no excuse of inexperience left.

That's exactly when what I now call, with some distance and a lot more humour than I felt at the time, the sponsorship began.

First came the money for flights so she could visit me in America. She claimed last-minute visa problems, and that the tickets couldn't be refunded if she cancelled them then. I sent it without thinking twice, honestly, it didn't even cross my mind to ask for proof or check any of it myself before wiring the money over.

Not long after I met her family in a rural part of Isaan, a simple house with chickens running loose in the yard, and that's when I discovered she had a young son she'd never once mentioned to me, not in all the months of calls and messages before that. I remember the exact feeling of watching the boy run up to her calling her mom and going completely blank for a few seconds, smiling on the outside while inside I ran back through every conversation from the previous months looking for the lie I'd missed.

She explained it to me that same afternoon, the two of us sitting on the porch while the boy played with a skinny dog a few feet away, telling me she hadn't mentioned him earlier out of fear I'd stop writing to her if I knew from the start. At the time it struck me as a reasonable enough explanation. Now it looks like the first brick of something a lot bigger.

Soon the conversations turned to financial support. Pom explained, with a calm that struck me at the time as sincerity, that if I wanted to be her boyfriend for real, I'd need to cover her living expenses, help support her parents, and contribute to her son's costs. She suggested a figure of 40,000 baht a month, said with the same casualness you'd use to mention the rent.

Blinded by love, or by stupidity, I honestly couldn't tell you today which one weighed more in that moment, I agreed without negotiating a single baht.

The requests didn't stop there, though. There was money for cosmetic work she said had been recommended to her, money for various family members I got to know a little more with each visit, then a motorbike because her old one wouldn't start anymore, and eventually even an entire car, a specific model she'd already shown me in photos months earlier the way you show off something you're just waiting for the right moment to ask for. Every visit became a little less enjoyable than the last, as I slowly realised I wasn't her boyfriend. I was her sponsor, and had probably been one from the start without wanting to see it.

Eventually I learned, by chance and from offhand comments made by people who knew her, that there were other people providing support as well, including a European boyfriend who showed up in social media stories I probably shouldn't have seen, and several expats living permanently in Bangkok, each apparently unaware of the others' existence, I imagine, all of them convinced they were the only one. One of those expats, whom I ran into unknowingly at a dinner organised by mutual friends of Pom's, spent half the evening enthusiastically telling me about this wonderful Thai girlfriend he had, describing details that sounded far too familiar to be pure coincidence. Neither of us said the name out loud that night, but we both knew, and we both kept drinking as if we hadn't.

I never had any real intention of marrying Pom, and I don't think she had any of marrying me either if I'm honest, but I'd convinced myself that having such an attractive girlfriend in Thailand was worth whatever it was costing me, like some kind of ordinary monthly subscription. In reality, I was being treated like an ATM with legs, nothing more and nothing less, and it took me a lot longer than I'm proud to admit before I could call it by its correct name out loud, even just to myself.

Eventually I ended the relationship, blocked her everywhere, phone number, social media, messaging apps, all of it at once on the same afternoon, and I never looked back once after that.

That's my story. I was in it for a lot longer than I'd like to admit out loud, but luckily I got out before it was truly too late, something I now, watching so many videos of other men describing exactly my same situation years later, value a lot more than I did at the time, back when I still genuinely believed I was the exception and not the rule.