She'd step outside to take calls from other guys. At least she was honest about it.

I'm Portuguese, 38, and Thailand had just opened the Phuket Sandbox when I decided to jump at it without thinking twice, booking the flight the same week I saw the news at work.

No quarantine, practically a miracle after everything we'd been through those two years, I'd been working hard for months, plenty of overtime and lost weekends, had money saved that I'd never had a proper chance to spend, and needed to get away for real. I wasn't looking for anything serious, just a casual time to decompress after so long stuck in work routines and endless video calls.

A woman I'd met online kept messaging me insisting on an actual date, messages almost daily asking when I'd finally make time for her. I kept making excuses one after another, not wanting to complicate a trip I'd planned with no strings attached, until eventually I gave in, more out of curiosity than anything else.

Her name was Som, 32 years old, and when she showed up outside my hotel on a stifling hot afternoon with a friend, dressed simply but with a lot of taste, I couldn't believe how good looking she was in person, far more than the profile photos let on.

Her friend Nu came along for the first three dates, sitting between the two of us at the start of dinner and then, as the nights went on, a little further away each time, which my mates later told me was a good sign for someone looking for something with actual potential rather than a one-off night. On the third date Nu basically asked me why I hadn't taken Som on a proper date yet, with that mix of curiosity and affectionate reproach only lifelong friends who've known each other since school can manage.

What followed were three months, genuinely, of the best time of my life to date. Kata Beach at sunset with the whole sky dyed orange, street food with the sun dropping over the water while we ate sitting barefoot in the sand, cheap hotels because Phuket was nearly empty due to the pandemic, whole streets shut and restaurants with barely any customers, and her showing me hidden beaches and local spots I'd never have found on my own, places with no name on any tourist map where it was just us and the odd local fisherman.

I made it clear from the start, that very first night we went out alone without Nu, that I was leaving eventually, didn't want a wife, didn't want kids, that this had an expiry date even if I didn't know exactly what it was yet. She said she was fine with that, not thinking much more of it at the time, nodding with a calm I read back then as maturity and now understand differently.

After three months I wanted to travel and see more of the country instead of staying in one place the whole time, so I headed to Bangkok and the islands to the south, Koh Samui and a couple of smaller stops along the way. We stayed in contact almost daily at first, but something didn't feel right as the weeks went on. She became distant, shorter replies, taking longer to answer each time, good morning texts that used to arrive right on time now delayed by hours or not coming at all. I missed her more than I expected, more than I'd missed anyone in a long while, and decided to go back to Phuket earlier than planned, changing flights and cutting the rest of the trip in half.

A week before I arrived we had a pretty heated argument over messages, and I pushed her on whether she'd met someone else in the meantime. She admitted it, but only because I kept pushing again and again without letting it go.

I'd already paid for flights and a hotel near her work, specifically chosen so I could see her between shifts, so there wasn't much point turning back at that stage, however bad I felt after the conversation.

I came back to Phuket single, rejected, staying in a noisy hotel next to a road with constant traffic and a rock hard mattress that creaked every time I moved, feeling genuinely low those first few days, wondering more than once whether I'd have been better off staying on the southern islands instead of coming back for more.

Then, on the third day back, she called out of nowhere. The other guy had gone home, a short work trip as I understood later. I wasn't naive anymore about what was actually going on, however much it had taken me a while to admit it at the time. She admitted she'd been talking to several men at once the whole time, keeping her options open in case any of them didn't work out.

We got back to how we were, meeting up nearly every afternoon after her shift, but this time both of us knew exactly what it actually was, no illusions attached anymore. She'd step outside the hotel room to take calls from other guys without any attempt to hide it, sometimes talking in the corridor for a good twenty minutes. I accepted it as it came, no drama about it. At least it was honest, more than a lot of others would have been in her place according to my mates who were also around at the time.

She'd bought me small gifts early on, t-shirts and things like that she found at some market on the way home, wrapped carefully despite how cheap they were, and I can see now, with some distance, that was part of making it feel like it wasn't about money from the very start, though she probably wasn't fully aware she was even doing it.

But to be honest, she never asked for anything directly in the entire four months, not once put a specific figure in front of me, but I paid for everything, down to the last coffee and the last tuk tuk ride, and when someone more generous came along, she moved on with him without much explanation or long goodbyes. When that ended, she came back to me again, as if nothing had happened in between. For every baht she spent on me, I spent a hundred on her, not exaggerating the figure much if you actually did the maths at the end of it all.

Four months total, counting from that first date with Nu chaperoning to the day I packed my bags to head back to Portugal. I hope she finds what she's looking for, whatever that means for her. I've tried to rekindle it a couple of times since, messaging her whenever I'm back in Thailand for work, and she's not interested, just wants to be friends, something she always says kindly but without leaving any real opening.

The lesson, if there's one to take from all this, is that even when it doesn't feel like it, there's always a cost involved in this kind of relationship, however honest and simple it looks on paper. If your girlfriend earns the equivalent of 15 dollars a day and you're on 150, of course you're going to end up covering most things, it's just simple maths and nobody needs to ask for it out loud for it to happen.

That's just reality, no dressing it up. Thai women in their thirties are mostly looking for security and someone they can rely on long term, someone who isn't going to pack up and leave after a few months. If you're not offering that, or something close to it, someone else probably will sooner or later, and there's not much to hold against her for that.