Monkey Follow
Written by Steve
When we were in Thailand, my new wife and I, we spent a little time with her Mum and the family. We would soon leave for England and did not know when we would be back.
Her mum lived, still lives, four hours out of Bangkok at the end of a dusty old road. The construction of her house involves lots of wood and corrugated tin, more holes in the walls than they have windows to put in them and no inside toilet.
I don't relate this as a good or bad thing, many people in Thailand live like this. It is relevant though, relevant in a big way to what happened when we got home to the U.K.
The wheels came off our relationship pretty quickly, the story appeared on Stickman's site in November (Monkey See Monkey Do) and I won't repeat it here.
I have read a lot of the submissions on the site and, while most of them tell tales of relationships with girls, not many seem to deal with how girls settle and we never, I never, get any inkling of what makes them tick. Women generally are a mystery to me, Thai women are a mystery in a foreign language which I cannot speak so have no hope of understanding.
I look at the whole episode in a reasonably detached way now: I got out of my marriage fairly well intact mentally and financially. I am not bitter or angry and, though there was some hostility initially, we are friends now and she stays at my house whenever she is in town.
The relationship itself was doomed from the start; not that I knew it then, but it is fairly clear now. I think there are two fundamental reasons why you are up against it bringing Thai girls to England. Maybe bringing any foreign girls back here.
Firstly; they don't integrate, they gravitate towards their own. What this means in practice is that your house, and life, will be invaded by Thai women who will go through your cupboards like a swarm of locusts, run your heating all day, play cards all night and leave the place smelling like an ashtray whether you smoke or not.
There will also be lots of conversations from which you will be excluded and you will always pick up the bill, how familiar does that sound?
Secondly; I think that we, as a society, are too conservative to accept mixed race relationships so you will always be the odd couple. You will still be invited to all the usual social functions but more as a conversational sideshow than as guests.
None of your wife's friends will be English; none of your friend's wives will help. What this leads to if you want your marriage to work is isolation; you better be in love because you will spend an awful lot of time together.
Of course, all this means that you gain an excellent insight into the way their minds work, which I pass on in stunned amazement. When I submitted my original piece I pointed out that I did not meet her in a bar but that I don't really see that as an issue. That bit at least was correct; it makes no odds where you meet them, they will be petulant to a staggering degree, dismissive to the point of arrogance and so short sighted that you will only believe it when you see it first hand.
I got a lot of e-mails from the first piece and the one that really stuck in my mind was from Dana, it said, pretty much word for word, that: 'of course it did not work; in terms of emotional development it is adults and children, it can never work'. I thought this a touch arrogant at first but I now see it very differently. <Dana REALLY got it spot on there – Stick>
We were looking for a new house; she dismissed semi-detached houses as 'stupid' and made it clear that she would settle for detached; I bought a semi anyway. I wanted an en-suite, this was 'stupid' too, nothing seemed to be good enough. From a girl that grew up in rural Thailand, see paragraph 2, this was a little hard to swallow.
Never once did she stand still and consider how much things cost here; she just stamped her foot and told me what she wanted. She also hit me for money to send home to her mum, and that was not going to happen. You get the picture now, I think.
Well she left, and soon found out how much things cost and just how tough it is to earn enough to get by here. To be fair, she has never come back and asked for money and has stood on her own feet so far. She got in touch in April to tell me that she will be going back to Thailand for a month; she missed her mum and her friends, the food and the weather; she was very excited.
She stayed with me the night before she left. I had helped her get a bank account and credit card, she seemed to have saved some money and I thought that she was getting herself set to buy some land near her Mum, what a nice idea and something of an achievement.
Well, she got back yesterday and guess what she bought while she was in Thailand? Bearing in mind that a plot of land can be had for a hundred thousand baht, a sum which could also transform her Mum's home? What would be the obvious purchase?
Well, what she bought was, and I still struggle to believe it, new tits! She has gone and had breast implants! Unreal.
I met an Australian guy in Chiang Mai once, he had the idea that the girls over there had 'no concept of recent history' and I think that is true; what you did for them yesterday counts for nothing. More than this, they have no thoughts for the future either.
Thai women, in my opinion, live in the moment and look neither forwards nor backwards. I think Dana's comments in the e-mail he sent me back in November were incisive; it can never work, we are far too different.
Coming from a Westerner married to a Thai woman, this may seem like absolute hypocrisy, but I agree…. I see very few Westerners married to Thai women in what I would term a "functioning marriage" where both parties are happy. Not elated, but just happy. A lot of guys make out that they are happy, but they are not. Irrespective of whether his or her background, I TRULY believe that it is a small number of Thai / farang marriages that really do work.
Life, Ride It For All It's Worth Part 1
Thai Thoughts And Anecdotes Part 46