A Thai Wife or Girlfriend

Disclaimer: This post is based just on observations and a few conversations we had with people. As Carrie says in her TravelPod, the few foreigners we spoke with who had Thai beaus also went on and on about how happy they were and how easy life was with their sweethearts. And in the end, all that really matters is that everyone is happy.

Another fascinating aspect of Thailand is the large amount of older and larger white men with young and attractive Thai woman. While some of these are surely a John/prostitute situation, many of them are in actual relationships.

Everywhere we looked we saw these girls canoodling and holding hands with men three times their age. While we would love to believe that these men come to Thailand and finally find true love, the truth is quite different.

Often, a foreigner buys a home and comes to Thailand a few times a year. During those visits, he lives there with his Thai girlfriend or wife who does whatever he wants. The rest of the time she has free reign on the place. Not a bad deal.

Other times it’s literally a case of a tourist coming into town and going to all the common tourist spots. The local girls know how to sweet talk them and make them feel loved, and in exchange these men treat them like princesses.

Sometimes, the relationship goes even further and marriage is involved. We spoke to a few men who had Thai wives who had children with other men before they met. Almost always the story involved money having to be paid off to the child’s father or some sort of financial rescue.

These men truly love their new family and think they have it all…and maybe they do, who are we to say, but we just can’t buy into it 100%. All I know is that in Bangkok I had to make a call from the visa office and saw a waiting room filled with bored looking Thai women sitting next to foreigners.