Thailand - Your Stories: Anonymous, Australia
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My Story
Regrettably, I was a victim of one of the many bad Thai women you've mentioned so often in your writings. I had been married to my wife in Australia for over 30 years when I stopped in Cha Am on my way home from the UK in 2011. There I was befriended by a woman who claimed that she hadn't been pursuing me but who had been doing just that for a number of days. The long and the short is that I gave up everything in Australia - my wife, my teenaged children (19 and 15 at the time), my two homes, my comfortable lifestyle - to come to Thailand to be with this woman. You can guess the rest. The financial demands became more and more to the point where she wanted to move her immediate family (two young sons, severely intellectually disabled sister and possibly her father as well) into the house that I bought not far from Hua Hin. Of course I refused and that was the end of the relationship. You will surely know how this felt for me. I must tell you that I had not been happy in my marriage for a long time but to give up everything for this awful woman after spending just five days with her was possibly the most foolish thing I've ever done.
I was quite lonely and extremely depressed for a couple of months after this relationship ended but I registered on the Thai dating web site Thailovelinks and met a number of women, most of whom had some problems that were not too difficult to spot - desire for money, poor English ability, dishonesty. I very quickly became extremely cynical about Thai women and came to understand what you say about them on your web site - that most of them want a falang man for the money that most of us have in life after having spent many years working in the West, often in jobs that they've largely hated or at least been unhappy with - in my case, 30 odd years working with the Australian Government in Canberra.
However, in November 2012, a year after I gave up my life in Australia to come to Thailand, I was contacted by my partner, Noo who lived in Hua Hin and has a small shop in Market Village, the local shopping mall. We quickly fell for each other and she has lived with me since January 2013. I love her deeply and I know that she loves me too. We have now been together for the last 20 months and we are very largely happy together. We have had our problems mainly as you predict due to the different cultural backgrounds and perspectives that we each have but, we are happy together and we plan to marry at some stage in the not too distant future.
Contrary to your advice, I have been paying Noo 10,000 baht a month simply to assist her and her family. This is not a great drain on me and I am happy to help them. I have met all of her immediate family except for her father who has been kept out of the picture with Noo's living with me. He has been described as a potentially dangerous man and this obviously concerns me but we feel that he will probably be OK with our relationship it is formalized at some stage in the not too distant future. If Noo and I marry, I will be happy to go down the Buddhist only ceremony rather than the formal registered marriage route as the Buddhist marriage carries no weight in law regarding property or other assets. Thankfully, the Buddhist marriage is all that Noo seems to want too and I will resist the registered marriage at all costs.
I have a nice house on land near Hua Hin and I have a car. My company (49 per cent ownership by me with all voting rights of the Thai nominees signed over to me as the Managing Director) owns the house and land and there is no way that either will ever be signed over to Noo even after any marriage that might occur. I am all too familiar with the situation where falang men put everything in the wife's name and then find themselves penniless. I have made it very clear to Noo that, after any marriage, I will make a new Will in Thailand leaving her one third of everything I own in Thailand. The remaining two thirds will go in equal third shares to my two children who live in Australia. I would have to ensure that there is something in my Will about selling up my assets at the time of my death and have the proceeds evenly distributed between Noo and each of my children. I think this should be quite possible as the company, house and land will only ever be in my name although I am aware of the possible difficulty of getting Noo and family out of my house after my death. I will seek legal advice about this when the time comes to change my Will.
The only respect in which I will disagree with your views is regarding the honesty of the average Thai. You maintain I think that the great majority of Thai people are honest if I've understood you correctly. In the two and a half years that I have lived in Thailand, I have been appalled and disappointed in Thai people. Before I moved to Thailand, I had been to Thailand on holiday 13 times and I thought Thais were (after the British) the nicest and most friendly of people. I now know that the Land of Smiles isn't quite right. Thais smile at us only because they're going through our pockets. I generally find Thais lazy, poorly educated, with little if any knowledge of the world, world history and current affairs and frankly pretty unintelligent, if not downright stupid. My young lady Noo is an exception to the unintelligent and uneducated rule which is one of the main reasons I love and respect her so much but even she is remarkably deficient in world history and world knowledge generally. And I am often dumbfounded by the ability of your average Thai to f**k up what should in many cases by "unf**kupable". Their stupidity beggars belief at times.