We shared a room with separate beds and her family wouldn't let me pay for a single meal. My last night, she chose to sleep somewhere else.

I was in my mid-to-late twenties when I first started visiting Thailand. I'm Swedish, from just outside Gothenburg, and I'm 39 now, so quite a lot of water has passed under the bridge since that first trip with a badly packed rucksack and no idea about anything.

After a few trips I'd already seen plenty of the typical bar scams, the drink that suddenly costs ten times what you agreed, the charming girl who just wants you to buy a round for the whole table before vanishing the second it's finished. I particularly remember one night, on an earlier trip than all this, where I ended up paying for three full rounds for a table of people I'd known barely half an hour, just because I didn't know how to say no in time. Nothing dramatic, just enough to learn the lesson quickly. So if I wanted something serious, I knew I needed to look somewhere else entirely, well away from Walking Street and anywhere with the music turned up too loud.

One day my cousin's Thai girlfriend told me she knew someone she thought would be perfect for me. Her name was Toey, and she told me about a friend of hers, Nam, who worked in the same profession as I did, spoke excellent English, was from Isaan, and was looking for something serious, not a holiday fling with the first foreigner who smiled at her in a bar.

We were introduced online on a Sunday afternoon, and before long we were talking every single day without fail, messages in the morning before work and long calls at night once we were both free, comparing work schedules that turned out to be surprisingly similar despite the time difference. At first we mostly talked about work, unbearable colleagues we each had on our own side of the world, until little by little the conversations started stretching past midnight with neither of us wanting to be the one to hang up first.

A few months later I flew to Thailand to finally meet her in person. She picked me up at the airport with a work friend, both of them holding improvised signs with my name spelled wrong that made me laugh the moment I walked out of arrivals, and we spent the first few days together in Pattaya and Koh Samet.

We got on brilliantly from the first moment, talking in person with the same ease as on the phone, as if we'd simply moved the conversation somewhere with a better view. But she took things very slowly. We even shared a hotel room with separate beds, which I actually respected quite a lot, especially coming from someone I'd only just met in person after months of messages and calls. I remember thinking, that first night, that it said more about her serious intentions than any message she could have sent me.

After that she took me to meet her family in Isaan. I'd always heard it was one of the poorer parts of Thailand, but her family were doing just fine. They had a spacious house with land around it, a couple of new motorbikes parked outside, and a vegetable patch her father tended with more care than I saw him give anything else the whole visit.

They welcomed me with open arms, showed me around the area, took me to see nearby temples and markets, and wouldn't even let me pay for a single meal no matter how many times I tried, which I did more than once without success. One afternoon her father insisted on showing me how he cut sugar cane with a machete he'd been using, according to Nam translating between laughs, since before she was even born. Before leaving I offered her mum 5,000 baht to thank them for everything, but she refused to accept it, almost offended I'd even suggested it, waving the offer away with a gesture that left no room for discussion.

When we got back near Bangkok, I stayed at her place for a few days while she was working, going out exploring on my own in the mornings, eating at local stalls without really knowing what I was ordering and just pointing at whatever looked most appetising, and meeting up with her in the evenings for dinner and to tell each other how our days had gone. We finally became a bit closer to each other, or so I thought at the time.

We even managed to squeeze in another trip together to Hua Hin before I flew back home, a couple of quiet days on the beach that felt like the best part of the whole trip, walking along the seafront at night with no rush to get anywhere in particular, stopping for seafood at stalls she always chose by smell rather than by how the price board looked.

Then, on my last night in Thailand, I'd booked a nice hotel for the two of us, something a bit special to close out the trip properly, but halfway there in the taxi she told me she'd be staying with a colleague instead.

She said it was a cultural difference, but I couldn't understand it at all and was really disappointed, sitting in the taxi not quite sure what to say or how to ask more without it sounding like a complaint. I tried asking her a couple more times during the ride, carefully, but every time I pushed a little she'd change the subject or look out the window as if the matter was already closed.

That evening I ended up going out on my own, had a few more drinks than I'd planned, and somehow finished the night partying with a group of Thai people I'd just met at a bar near the hotel, singing songs I didn't know and toasting things I never fully understood. One of the waitresses was clearly interested in me, flirting openly between rounds, leaning on the bar every time she walked past my stool. One of the guys in the group, seeing me turn her down so politely, asked me laughing whether I had a Thai girlfriend, and I didn't quite know how to answer that particular question that night. But despite everything that had happened with what I thought was my girlfriend, I still couldn't bring myself to go further than the bar with her. I said a polite goodbye when they closed and went back to the hotel alone, still turning the night over in my head.

The next morning my girlfriend was waiting for me in the hotel lobby to take me to the airport, just as she'd promised the night before by message, the same smile as always as if nothing had happened at all.

Before I left, right at the gate almost, I gave her 10,000 baht to thank her for taking time off work and showing me so much over those weeks. I wanted to do it, and I never felt pressured, not even a hint of one.

Once I got back to the UK though, things slowly faded away. She hardly messaged anymore, never asked if I'd arrived home safely, and eventually told me straight out that she didn't want a boyfriend anymore, without much more explanation than that. I respected her decision without dwelling on it and left it there, without pushing her for any explanations she didn't owe me, though for a while it was hard not to replay every detail of the trip in my head looking for what I'd missed, from the room with the separate beds to that last night's change of plans in the taxi.

I've been back to Thailand plenty of times since then, almost every single year in fact, but I've never seen her again in person. We still exchange the odd birthday message, and every now and then she'll ask if I want to meet when she's travelling in Europe for work, but that's as far as it ever goes, no coffee, no firm answer whenever I actually suggest it seriously. Once she was in a city less than two hours away from me by train, and even then the plan stayed at an exchange of messages that never turned into anything concrete.

It never turned into the relationship I hoped for when I booked that first flight, but it also wasn't a horror story like the ones I'd heard before meeting her. She still seems, from what I can tell through those occasional messages, a genuinely good person, and the experience taught me, without a shadow of a doubt, that if you're looking for a decent Thai partner, they are out there, even if nobody tells you that when all you've seen is Walking Street at night. You just have to look in the right places, actually talk before getting on a plane, and accept that sometimes, even doing everything right, things simply don't turn out the way you hoped.