At 60, I flew to a village in Isaan for a wedding that wasn't mine, and for a few hours it felt like it was.

I turned 60 the same month Kop invited me to her cousin's wedding.

I didn't see it coming. We had been messaging on Line for almost a year, meeting up every time I flew back to Thailand, neither of us ever putting a name to whatever it was. I had met her in a bar, an ordinary night, over warm beer and music that was too loud, and I got hooked in a way I hadn't expected to feel again at 59. Every trip of mine started getting built around the dates she could see me, and every message of hers on Line had me checking my phone like I was twenty years younger than I was.

She was 23.

Over that year of messages and short visits we never talked much about the future. I would fly out, we'd spend a few days together, I'd go home, and she'd carry on with her life in Thailand while I counted the months to the next ticket. I never seriously asked myself what she saw in a man almost forty years older. I preferred not to ask and just enjoy the answer already in front of me.

When she told me her cousin was getting married in Buriram, deep in Isaan, and that she wanted me to come along, I said yes before she'd even finished the sentence. It didn't feel like a big decision. It just felt like the natural next step in something that had already been building, in fits and starts, across a year and a distance.

We flew together from Bangkok. At the airport a cousin of hers was waiting with a pickup truck, the open-bed kind, and the heat poured in from every side for the whole drive along roads that kept narrowing the further we got from the city. I didn't speak a word of Thai and the cousin didn't speak any English, so I decided, without thinking too hard about it, to hand Kop total control of the trip: the hotel, the schedule, what to wear where, when to talk and when to keep quiet. Trusting a woman 37 years younger than me that blindly probably should have given me more pause than it did at the time. All I could think about then was how good it felt, for once, to just be led.

The hotel turned out to be a modest, clean three-star place, with fans instead of air conditioning in some of the rooms, and it cost so little a night that I asked the price twice before I believed it. I remember thinking that in Europe that amount wouldn't have covered a coffee at the airport.

We went to meet her parents the next day.

Her mother was 72. Her father, around 70. I did the math without meaning to, standing outside the house with my hands in my pockets, and it didn't add up no matter how I arranged it: a man who'd just turned 60, holding hands with a daughter her parents had had when they were themselves anything but young. Nobody said a word about it, not that day or any of the following ones. Neither did I. I just carried on, the way I'd been doing since the day I met her.

The house was one of the traditional kind, up on wooden stilts, with family life happening underneath in the shade and the bedrooms up above. Even though Kop and I were sharing a room at the hotel, I wasn't allowed upstairs there. We weren't married, and in her family that still meant something. I understood immediately and, to be honest, I even appreciated it. There was something reassuring about there being rules, even if they weren't mine.

That afternoon Kop showed me her scooter, a fairly new one, with details that clearly weren't the second-hand touches I'd been picturing. It was the first time I started to suspect she wasn't the simple village girl I'd assumed, without really thinking about it, since that first night in the bar. There were layers there I hadn't accounted for, and I felt a little foolish for not noticing sooner.

In all the time I knew her, the only thing she ever asked me for was a fridge for her parents. The three of us went to the nearest mall one afternoon and picked one out laughing, comparing models like any ordinary family out shopping on a Saturday. It cost a ridiculous amount for what it meant to them, and we drove it back roped down in the bed of the pickup, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

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Wedding day arrived with flowers everywhere, red carpets laid out from the entrance, and close to 200 guests, only a handful of us foreigners.

Kop introduced me to everyone as her boyfriend, saying the word with an ease that still caught me off guard every time I heard it. Among the guests was her childhood best friend, the one she'd grown up with in the same village, who was getting a fair amount of attention that day from young cousins who kept coming over to say hello and lingering longer than they needed to. I'll admit that stirred up something like jealousy in me more than once over the course of the day, for no real reason, just the foolish insecurity of a man who knows exactly how old he is.

The procession was the most striking thing I've ever seen at a wedding. The sin sod, the dowry, was handed over in front of everyone in stacks of cash and trays of gold passed hand to hand among the family's elders, and then the ceremony continued outdoors, with the groom carried in on shoulders on a sort of makeshift throne while the bride waited kneeling before him, her head bowed.

The reception that followed had incredible food, better than anything I'd had in Bangkok, and even though I didn't speak Thai I ended up having long conversations, since a good number of the guests spoke solid English. Among them were several foreigners who'd been settled there for years with Thai wives, long before anything like the bar scene I knew had ever existed, and who talked about Thailand with the kind of calm that only comes with time.

For those hours I felt, strangely, like part of a Thai family I'd barely known for two days. I even ended up in several of the wedding photos, standing next to Kop, her parents, and her childhood friend, which, looking back, is a curious thing for that couple to have to explain years down the line, when someone flips through that album and asks who the older foreigner in the corner was.

We left after a few hours, since the next day we were flying with her parents to Bangkok and then Pattaya, the first flight of their lives, both of them. Watching them nervous at the departure gate, at their age, felt more moving than the wedding itself.

Kop and I aren't together anymore. The relationship faded the way these things usually do, with no big reason to point to, no fight to mark as the end. Over time we messaged less on Line, and then we stopped altogether.

But that trip gave me a look at real Thai life I never expected to get, far from any bar and from anything I'd imagined when it all started. I still think sometimes about that fridge in her parents' kitchen, about the house on stilts, about the photo where I'm standing there, a 60-year-old foreigner, next to a family that wasn't mine but that treated me like it was for one day. And I'll always be glad I said yes that night, without thinking twice.