I found her dancing in a Soi Cowboy bar. Nine months later our daughter was born in Thailand.

I'm Romanian, and in January 2018, at 31 years old, I finally made it to Thailand.

I'd travelled to nearly 40 countries over the years, always with a bag ready and a growing list of places still to see, but Thailand had somehow always slipped through my fingers, a cancelled flight one time, work getting in the way another, until it started to feel like a running joke among my friends. My relationship back home had basically already run its course, my girlfriend was working in Finland on a temporary contract that kept getting extended, and we barely saw each other anymore, down to short messages at night. We broke up not long after that trip, without much drama, almost like something overdue finally resolving itself.

Before the trip, still back in Romania, I'd signed up on a couple of dating apps and started chatting to a few women there, more out of curiosity than any real plan. One of them, Fon, was a teacher at a school in Bangkok, wrote excellent English, and we agreed to meet up in person once I landed.

When I finally got there, exhausted from the flight but too wired to sleep, she wasn't answering her phone at all, not a message, not a call, so my mates and I ended up spending a few nights in Soi Cowboy instead, going with the flow without much of a plan. You can read all you want about those bars online beforehand, whole forums dedicated to the subject, but nothing really prepares you for the real thing, the lights, the noise, the sheer number of people. We had a great time those first nights and spent way too much money, more than we'd planned, the way most people probably do in that situation.

A couple of months later I saw a ridiculous flight deal, return to Bangkok for 279 euros. I booked it on the spot without even knowing who I'd travel with this time. Ended up going solo, which turned out to be, without any doubt, the best decision I've ever made in my life.

I remembered one of the other girls from the apps I'd talked to before my first trip, Jit, who lived in Bangkok, and I still had her number saved from months back. I called her without much hope and, to my surprise, she agreed to meet me that same night at the bar where she worked.

Turns out the bar was in Soi Cowboy, same as the ones I'd visited on my first trip a few months earlier, though a different one from the ones I already knew. I walked in not really knowing what to expect from the night, and after a few minutes I saw her at the back, getting ready with some other girls to dance on stage.

She came straight over the moment she saw me walk in, no hesitation, and her English was decent, a bonus I honestly wasn't expecting that night. We spent the whole night talking non-stop about all sorts of things, her family, my travels, and afterwards eating street food outside, sitting on low plastic stools while the rest of Soi Cowboy carried on around us at its usual pace. When I asked her age she said 22. I didn't believe her until she pulled her Thai ID card out of her bag and showed it to me directly.

Sitting in my hotel room the following night, reading back through her messages one by one, I cancelled all my other travel plans and stayed in Bangkok for the rest of the week.

We spent the next few days just together, nothing special planned beyond being close to one another, movies in overly air-conditioned malls, food from street stalls she always picked far better than I ever could, talking about our lives late into the night, laughing at silly things I can barely remember now. She even started teaching me odd Thai words as we walked around the city, correcting my pronunciation with endless patience every time I butchered it.

I want to be clear that I treated her with nothing but respect the whole time, no exceptions, and she never once asked me for money or anything else in exchange for being together. When it was time to leave she came with me to the airport, both of us avoiding each other's eyes a little too much, and I told her maybe I'd be back in September, no firm promise attached to it. I honestly didn't think much would come of it, just another holiday ending like any other.

But we started calling each other every single day without fail, never skipping one no matter how tired either of us was. Sometimes three or four hours of video call at a stretch, losing track of where the time went, talking about anything and nothing in particular. A month after I got home I was already booking another flight back, without needing much of an excuse to justify it to myself. We met in Bangkok and travelled together to Phuket and Chiang Mai, our first real trip as a couple, not just two people getting to know each other.

I kept going back, again and again, sometimes twice a month, organising work around the flights rather than the other way round. I was bleeding a serious amount of cash on plane tickets but didn't care in the slightest at that point in my life. She eventually left the bar for good, something she decided on her own without me ever asking her to directly, moved back home to her village, and we went together to visit her family there, sitting on the floor of her house eating what her mother had cooked.

In early 2019 she told me over video call she'd been feeling off for a few days, tired for no obvious reason. A pregnancy test came back negative that same afternoon, then two days later a different one came back positive, no doubt about it whatsoever. I booked a flight for Valentine's Day without thinking twice, the first one available I could find. We talked about the future that same week, sitting together on her bed looking at the test result, and I promised I'd bring her and the baby to Europe as soon as we could get everything properly organised.

I moved to the UK shortly after, got a small business going with a mate from scratch, and nine months later our daughter was born in a hospital in Thailand while I held her hand. I stayed for six weeks straight getting to know my daughter day by day, then started grinding through all the paperwork nobody really explains properly until it's your turn, citizenship for my daughter, a visa for Jit, months and months of endless forms and appointments at immigration offices.

She was finally approved in February 2020, after months of waiting and checking the mail every single day. I flew straight to Thailand and brought them both home just weeks before Thailand closed its borders because of COVID, by a margin that, looking back now, feels incredibly narrow. We got married quickly, no big ceremony, sorted her Romanian residence permit first, and eventually, once the three of us were settled, got her a full UK family visa too.

These days we're just a normal family getting on with everyday life, school, work, the weekly shop, the same things any other family in any other town deals with. We have the occasional argument like everyone does, nothing serious that doesn't get sorted out by talking. But we never stop loving each other, not for a single day across all these years together. Every night I still kiss her on the forehead before we sleep, without fail, a small ritual that started without either of us planning it and that I couldn't imagine stopping now.

I found her in a bar in Bangkok, some ordinary Tuesday that could have gone a thousand different ways. Against all the odds, against any reasonable probability anyone would have given us back then, we built an entire life together. I couldn't be more grateful for how things turned out in the end.