Om never asked me for a penny in two years. Now she runs Thai nights at our pub.

I'm British, was 26 at the time, worked in an office on the outskirts of Manchester and had been needing to break the routine for months, and I first visited Thailand in March 2015 with a friend who'd been there two or three times over the years before and wouldn't stop insisting I had to see it for myself.

We decided to travel the whole country, with a fairly loose itinerary, spending two or three days wherever we ended up stopping before moving on. We started the holiday in Pattaya and finished in Phuket almost three weeks later, taking in Koh Samui, Koh Phangan and Phi Phi Island along the way, a trip that felt like the most ambitious thing I'd ever done at the time.

Our first night in Pattaya we spent in the bars on Soi Buakhao, the heat still clinging to our clothes after a long haul flight, where I got talking to a lady named Om.

My mate had already told me how the bars worked in places like Pattaya, so I thought I roughly knew what to expect from the conversation, or so I believed at the time. Om had her hair tied back and was wearing a bar t-shirt a couple of sizes too big, and spoke pretty good English, with that distinct accent you notice straight away in someone who learned the language listening to tourists rather than in a classroom.

While we were talking, Om told me she worked in a coffee shop through the day and had only started working in the bar a couple of weeks before, because her younger sister worked there too and they'd needed the extra money that particular month, as she explained without making much of it. I just assumed it was the usual story they told, exactly the kind of thing my mate had warned me girls in these places tended to say to win sympathy. Still, there was something about the way she told it, without drama or insistence, that stuck with me more than I expected.

As the night went on, Om and I decided to grab a few more drinks back at the hotel once her shift finished, since she had the next day off from the coffee shop. My mate stayed at the bar with another group he'd met that same night, so Om and I walked the short distance to the hotel alone, chatting about nothing much, my flight home, her hometown, in no hurry to get there.

The next morning Om left early, before I'd even properly woken up. She asked if we could exchange numbers, so we did, tapping them into each other's phones between laughs at how badly I fumbled the Thai keyboard, and went on her way. I met back up with my mate for the rest of the holiday, thinking that would be the last I'd see of Om on that trip, and told him as much, half joking, when he asked how my night had gone.

We carried on round the rest of the country as planned, Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, Phi Phi, each island with its own pace and its own light, but I'll admit I thought about Om more over those weeks than I'd have admitted to my mate at the time. I caught the Thailand bug completely, and as soon as we got back I booked flights for that November without thinking twice, almost before I'd unpacked from the first trip.

On our second trip we decided to spend five nights in Pattaya, and the first morning we stopped for a drink while wandering around with no particular destination, jet lag still in my bones and wanting a decent coffee more than anything else.

We stopped at a little coffee shop off Beach Road, a couple of tables outside under a sun-faded awning, and Om was serving the coffees behind the counter. She stood still for a second when she saw me, like she couldn't quite believe it was me, before breaking into a proper smile. She asked why I hadn't kept in touch, almost like an affectionate telling-off, and told me she no longer worked at the bar, that she and her sister had moved back in with the family in their second, more rural hometown, and that she now only did shifts at her aunt's coffee shop.

Om and I went out that evening and caught up properly, sitting at a simple roadside restaurant, talking for hours about things that had nothing to do with bars or tourists.

This time I did keep in touch with Om, because I genuinely believed she was being honest with me, not spinning the usual bar stories my mate had described before the first trip. She never asked for anything, never hinted at anything, she just messaged to tell me how her day had gone, and that, more than anything else, was what gradually lowered my guard.

I spent the next couple of weeks visiting Om and staying in regular touch, catching the bus out to her village a couple of times to meet her mum and sister, who welcomed me with a kindness I hadn't expected given how little we still knew each other. Back in England we kept talking almost daily over video call, working around the time difference as best we could, and Om never asked me for a penny during those two full years, something I came to understand, over time, wasn't remotely typical from everything I'd read and heard about relationships like this.

Towards the end of 2017, Om told me she wanted to come visit me in England, but admitted, with a bit of embarrassment in her voice, that she didn't have the money for the flight and had no idea when she'd manage to save it working at the coffee shop.

So I decided I'd pay for Om's flight, once we finally got a tourist visa sorted for her, which turned out to be a good deal more complicated than it looks on paper, with interviews, bank statements and invitation letters that took us weeks to pull together. When I finally saw her walk out through arrivals at Heathrow, with a suitcase far too big and a face that hadn't slept a wink on the flight, I felt a knot in my stomach I hadn't felt in a long time. We spent every waking minute together during that visit, I showed her my hometown, my parents, my oldest mates, and she settled into all of it with an ease that surprised me.

After that first visit to England there were more, and I went back to Thailand just as many times, each trip a little longer than the last, until we stopped counting the days we'd spent apart and started talking seriously about what to do about it all. We got married in a small ceremony, nothing lavish, with her family there and a handful of my own friends who made the trip just to be there, and I remember thinking that day that neither of us could have imagined, back on that first night on Soi Buakhao, that things would end up here.

Fast forward to now, Om and I have a gorgeous two-year-old boy, who's already starting to babble a few words of Thai thanks to the weekly video calls with his grandmother, and we're happily married, something that wouldn't have crossed my mind a few years ago.

I've got fantastic in-laws in Thailand, lovely people who always greet us with open arms whenever we go back to visit, loading the fridge with homemade food to bursting even if we're only staying a few days, and Om and I run a pub in my hometown, where we've built a proper reputation for the food, especially our Thai theme nights, where Om absolutely smashes it with her cooking and the locals queue up to try her pad kra pao. She's turned what used to be a fairly ordinary neighbourhood pub into something people book ahead for on a Thursday night.

I wanted to share this story because it ends happily, unlike some of the horror stories that no doubt reach this channel. I just wanted to show people that it isn't all doom and gloom, and that real happiness can turn up exactly when you least expect it, even starting in the most typical, suspicious-sounding way possible, in a bar on Soi Buakhao on an ordinary night in March.