350 guests, a village chief consulting his charms for the date, and years later a message asking for a divorce.

This all starts when I was 50, divorced, and still fit and active. My name's Dean, I'm from Sydney.

An old mate, Gary, suggested over the phone that we meet in Phuket instead of the UK trip I'd had planned for months, something about cheap flights he'd found and wanting to see something other than Manchester in winter. I changed my plans almost without thinking twice. We landed within half an hour of each other, dumped our bags in the hotel room without a second thought, and headed straight out without even showering. That first night on Bangla Road was something else compared to anything I'd known before, and this was far from my first time in Thailand.

A few nights in, with Gary and me settled into a routine of beach bars and restaurants, we saw two girls working at a restaurant bar near the hotel, got chatting to them while we waited for the bill, and they ended up going out with us that same night. That was how I met Tick, 27, with a smile you could spot from across the street and a way of laughing at my terrible jokes that made me feel far funnier than I actually am.

We got on so well from the start, laughing and talking late into the night, that I asked her to spend the remaining five days of my trip with me instead of working the bar. She agreed without much hesitation, and Gary, credit to him, never once complained about being left to his own devices for the rest of the trip.

Back in Sydney I was video calling her on Line every day, sometimes for hours at a stretch, sprawled on the sofa with the phone charging beside me because the battery couldn't keep up with that much talking. I flew back multiple times on short trips, four or five days at most, just to keep things going between work commitments. I met her family on one of those visits, and went out to see her parents in a rural area where her father would head out at night to hunt rats and frogs with a torch strapped to his head, a local tradition that struck me as fascinating and terrifying in equal measure, something completely alien to anything I'd seen before in my life. I tried both, sitting on the packed dirt floor of the family kitchen out of politeness, but couldn't bring myself to finish the field rat no matter how hard I tried.

We started talking about marriage, without me really noticing at what exact point the conversation went from a vague idea to a concrete plan. Her sister called the whole family, called the village chief, who consulted his good luck charms to pick a date, and Tick announced it on Facebook before I'd properly finished agreeing to any of it.

The wedding was set for the following March, about 350 guests split between my side, which barely filled two tables, and hers, which seemed to take up the entire village, traditional Thai dress first with all the ceremony that involved, then Western dress for the rest of the day. We started at six in the morning with the holy water ceremony over our hands and didn't finish until two the following morning, with music, dancing, and more food than any human being should attempt in a single day. Gary flew out from the UK just to be there, in a suit clearly not built for Thai heat, and kept saying all day that he'd never seen a wedding like it.

Getting Tick to Sydney proved far more complicated than I'd imagined. The first tourist visa got knocked back with no real explanation. The spouse visa application cost seven thousand Australian dollars, required fingerprints and iris scans in Bangkok, a full medical exam, and could take twelve to eighteen months to process.

A second tourist visa did get approved, so I brought her over in July. She spent the whole three weeks telling me it was too cold and everything was better in Thailand. She went home and told me, quite calmly, that she couldn't move to Australia permanently.

So I started looking at moving to Thailand instead. I spent months researching businesses, flying back and forth to meet brokers, and eventually bought a small guest house in Patong in December 2016. I handed in my notice at work in Sydney. The handshakes and envious looks from colleagues are something I still remember clearly.

High season was brilliant, nearly fully booked through all of January, money coming in steadily, and the feeling that I'd made the right call getting stronger every week. The work was brutal though, 7am to midnight most days, bookings, cleaning, guest complaints, improvised repairs, all at once and no real downtime. Tick moved in and we lived together in a house ten minutes from the place, though in practice I spent more hours there than I ever spent at home.

By February Tick had completely lost interest in the relationship. I started spending nights at the guest house whenever a spare room was free. One thing led to another and I got involved with another woman, Lynn. One of Tick's friends saw us together.

What followed were months of pure chaos, the kind I still find hard to fully explain to people back home without them assuming I'm exaggerating for effect. Bar fights with glasses and ashtrays flying through the air. Tick leaving and then coming back, sometimes within the same week. Me juggling both women, very badly at that, lying to both of them in ways that felt sensible at 2am and completely indefensible by morning.

From what I heard, Tick reportedly organised serious trouble for Lynn, serious enough that Lynn and I had to leave town for a few days.

Her sister turned up with a group of people, the police were called, everyone got arrested and released with a warning. It was completely out of control.

Eventually Lynn and I stopped seeing each other, both of us worn out by months of constant tension neither of us had really asked for. I tried to get back with Tick, even wrote her a long letter explaining myself, but she'd already moved on and told me no, no apparent bitterness but no room for discussion either.

The guest house struggled through low season. I sold it, and it became clear Tick didn't know Thai law particularly well, because in reality most of the sale money was owed to her, while she thought the split was a straightforward 50/50.

I opened a bar restaurant with a Thai business partner that lasted three months before completely falling apart, over disagreements about money and hours that in hindsight I should have seen coming from the very first week. I spent a while driving around Thailand, Krabi, Trang, Bangkok, Phi Phi, Koh Lanta, with no real plan beyond getting away from Patong for a while and clearing my head after everything that had happened.

I ran into Tick again and we got back together fairly loosely. Eventually she agreed to give Sydney a proper go. She arrived in June 2019, got a bank account set up and had a job lined up at a butcher shop. The first few weeks were fine.

Then her demeanour changed, she became more distant, more glued to her phone than usual, and I started to get suspicious without quite wanting to admit it fully to myself. One night, while she was asleep next to me, I used her fingerprint to unlock her phone as carefully as I could without waking her. I found messages from several different men, including one who'd visited her in Thailand during one of our breaks, complete with photos and future plans that didn't leave much room for doubt.

I sent her the screenshots and confronted her that same night. The next morning I told her she was going back to Thailand. A week later she was on a plane.

We messaged occasionally after that, less and less often as time went on. The last message I got from her was asking for a divorce.

Now, with some distance and a lot more calm than I had at the time, I sometimes think back to that wedding in March, the 350 guests and the village chief consulting his charms to pick a date, and I struggle to reconcile that image with the last screen on my phone asking me for a divorce years later. I suppose both things were real in their own way, just at completely different moments of the same story.

Four years, two businesses, one marriage, and more drama than most people see in a lifetime. Thailand well and truly got under my skin, and I've been back several times since. Just not to Phuket.