Her mum had always planned for her to move to Germany and run the family business. I showed up two weeks before that was meant to start.

I moved to Thailand a couple of years ago, aged 23, single, British, from Leeds, with no plan beyond teaching English for a while and seeing what happened after that.

I spent my first year teaching in Khon Kaen, and later started studying at university in Bangkok. I'm 25 now, so in perspective it hasn't actually been that long since then, though sometimes, looking back at it all, it feels a lot longer than it really was.

Before I started work I had a whole month to myself, and like a lot of single guys arriving in Thailand for the first time, I made the most of it. Nights out every night, beaches, music festivals I didn't even know the names of until I got there, the whole routine anyone who's passed through here at that age will recognise without me needing to spell it out. I remember getting back to the flat I'd rented almost always at dawn, flip-flops in hand, feeling like I was living exactly the life I'd pictured before getting on the plane in Manchester, the nearest airport to home.

After a while, though, the partying started wearing me out more than it entertained me. I was starting to notice the three-in-the-morning conversations repeating themselves almost word for word from one weekend to the next. Just before I started teaching, I met a Thai woman called Nisa. She wasn't involved in the nightlife at all, not even close. She was a university graduate, from Ubon Ratchathani, in Isaan, and she happened to be in Khon Kaen for work when we met almost by chance, in a coffee shop near my new flat, politely arguing over which of us had grabbed the last free table by the window, until we ended up sharing it without either of us proposing it outright, it just happened.

Not long after we met, she had to fly to Germany to visit her mum, who'd been living there for years and had built a genuinely successful business from scratch, starting apparently with little more than savings and a lot of stubbornness.

I thought I'd end up making the most of those weeks to enjoy the single life again, honestly, which felt like a reasonable enough thing to assume at the time. But it never even crossed my mind once she was actually on that plane. We FaceTimed every single night without fail, sometimes falling asleep with the phone still on and the screen pointing at the ceiling, and we stayed completely faithful to each other the whole time, without either of us ever having to ask the other for it.

The biggest problem wasn't our relationship at all. It was her mum.

She'd always planned for her daughter to move to Germany and eventually help run the family business with her, something discussed and agreed between the two of them for years. Then I came along, just a couple of weeks before those plans were supposed to start becoming real.

At first, her mum wasn't happy with me at all. The early three-way video calls were pretty tense, with Nisa translating between the two sides of the conversation and softening, I suspect, lines that weren't nearly so soft in the original. There was one call in particular that lasted barely five minutes before her mum found an excuse to hang up. But over time, week after week, she saw that we genuinely cared about each other, and slowly came around, first with short questions about my job, later with messages sent directly to me without going through Nisa as the middleman.

My girlfriend also stood by me from the start, even though she knew perfectly well she was going against what her mum had originally planned for her, which isn't an easy thing to do in Thailand, where family opinion carries far more weight than I was used to seeing back home among my friends and their parents.

We ended up living together while I was still teaching in Khon Kaen, in a small flat near the school with a fan that made more noise than air and a neighbour who left fruit on our doorstep with no explanation whatsoever, before eventually moving to Bangkok when I started university there.

One of the things that really convinced me this was real was that she actually had more money than I did, not less. Her mum sent her a fairly generous monthly allowance from Germany, we split every bill fifty-fifty without even discussing it, and she even bought me a decent second-hand motorbike and a new laptop when mine broke right before a final exam. I remember protesting when the bike showed up, insisting I could pay for it myself in instalments, and she just shrugged and told me it was already done, to stop going on about it. At no point did I ever feel like I was being treated as a walking ATM, not even close, quite the opposite if I'm honest.

Being with her has shown me a completely different side of Thailand. Instead of bars and nightlife, we've spent our time visiting Isaan, exploring small towns and local markets, eating at places with no English menu where I just had to point and trust the process, and seeing parts of the country I'd never have found on my own with a guidebook in hand.

I particularly remember one weekend at her grandmother's house near Ubon Ratchathani, the three of us sitting on the kitchen floor while she made somtam at a speed I couldn't follow with my eyes, explaining every ingredient she added to the mortar as if it were the first time anyone had ever asked her about it with real interest.

The first time her mum came to Thailand after all that, she insisted on cooking for the two of us herself in the tiny kitchen of our Bangkok flat, something Nisa told me afterwards was a huge deal, far bigger than it looked from the outside. The three of us sat on a sofa built for two, eating a curry with spices I'd never tried before, and at some point that evening her mum asked me, straight out and in English considerably better than she'd let on during those first video calls, what I was planning to do with my life long-term. I couldn't tell if it was a test or genuine curiosity, but I answered as honestly as I could.

Months later, already settled in Bangkok, the three of us took a trip together to Isaan for Nisa's grandmother's birthday, and her mum spent a good chunk of the weekend teaching me local dialect words Nisa herself didn't even use in Bangkok anymore, correcting my pronunciation with a patience that would have seemed impossible coming from her a few months earlier.

Originally, I planned to teach for two years and then head back to the UK, with no more concrete plans than that. Now I've decided to stay in Thailand, keep studying, and build my future here with her. I'm certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that she's the woman I'm going to marry, and I don't say that lightly, nor just to round off a story nicely for whoever ends up reading it.

I know there are plenty of stories out there about girls from bars and heartbreak, and I'm not saying they don't happen, because I've seen it up close in a mate of mine who arrived around the same time as me and went home a fair bit poorer and considerably sadder than he'd left, having learned most of the same lessons the hard way. But they're only one small part of Thailand, the part that gets told most often because it's the easiest to tell and fits what people already expect to hear before you've even started talking.

There are plenty of genuine Thai women out there too, and meeting the right person completely changed my life, far more than I ever expected when I packed that bag at 23 with no real idea what I was walking into or how long I'd end up staying for.

Sometimes I think back to that first month of partying and struggle to recognise myself in that version of me, not out of any particular embarrassment, just because it feels like a chapter from someone else's life. That lad had no idea he'd meet the woman he plans to marry within a few weeks, or that he'd end up preferring a weekend in an Isaan village to any beach party on the coast, or that he'd end up arguing with a mother-in-law over video call in Thai he was still only half fluent in, stumbling through half-remembered vocabulary while everyone waited patiently on the other end.