My First Trips to Thailand and Building a Life With My Thai Wife

The first time I went to Thailand was in 2010. Like many people who go, I loved it. There wasn’t anything I disliked about Thailand.

And no, I wasn’t one of the guys who liked to go to the bars all the time. I preferred doing more cultural things – going to the temples, going to a language school, maybe even a cooking school. There’s so much that Thailand has to offer.

During that trip in 2010, I decided that Thailand was the best place I’d ever been.

I hated all those guys who went to Thailand to do those sorts of things. I don’t know who those guys think they are. I feel like they give a bad name to people like me who do everything the right way in Thailand.

I left in 2010 knowing I would return. At that moment I was 40, and I went to the country again in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018. I moved permanently in 2022. I retired when I was 52 and ready to start enjoying myself in my favorite country, surrounded by the world’s friendliest people, and life was everything I wanted it to be.

I do need to tell you – if you’re expecting me to tell you how I lost all my money to a Thai girl or how I invested all my money into a random business, you are sadly mistaken. I’m not going to tell you anything of the sort because that hasn’t happened to me. Yes, I have a house that I built.

Yes, my wife has a business. But I did it the right way.

I am one of the few expats in a successful relationship with a Thai girl. And not to mention, I didn’t meet her in a bar.

I did everything like every expat should. And I think if you listen to what I have to say, you will agree that I was right and everybody else was wrong.

My Philosophy on Thailand

So, I hope you are brave enough to put this on your channel. But I bet you’re not. You’re just another one of those idiot farangs who can’t accept Thailand for what it actually is – a great country.

If there are things you don’t like about it, keep them to yourself. Nobody cares if you think something is wrong. Nobody cares if you’re trying to tell people an honest opinion of how you think of the country.

Nobody cares. We only want to hear the good things because that’s what we experience. Anything negative is only told in a bad light.

And because of that, even if it’s true, you shouldn’t even say it.

Before you get into saying “farang” is an offensive word – no, it’s not. I’m happy to be called a farang in Thailand because that’s what I am.

So, unfortunately for you, I haven’t lost all my money, and I can’t wait to tell you how I have done things so much better than everyone else.

Please understand, I am not trying to gloat. I’m just trying to let guys know how to do things in Thailand.

I’m living here now. In fact, I’m typing this from the house I built in Buriram where I live with my wife, and I have a great time. And if you want to do that as well, don’t be like those guys who say everything is wrong.

How I Met My Wife

Firstly, I want to tell you about my current living conditions. As I’ve already mentioned, I was lucky enough to meet a wonderful girl. She was only 17 years younger than me, and she loves me for me, not for the fact that I give her any money.

It’s a real relationship, which so many guys seem to want so badly, yet fail to understand you have to do that with a real girl who actually loves you.

It amazes me how so many guys don’t understand how to find a girl that loves them. Maybe I’m just lucky that I found a great girl.

But I’ll tell you how I met her, and I’ll tell you that I’m doing things right. So, I think it only makes sense that you pay special attention to this because it is important. Maybe someone listening to this can finally start to have some success in their own life.

So, I met my girl in a club. She was out with some friends. I was out by myself, and she came over to talk to me.

We started talking and we hit it off straight away. She invited me over to the table with her friends, and they all were great people, and I felt fortunate enough to be in that moment with some real Thai people.

My current wife – who I met then – I think she really fell in love with me as soon as she saw me, because she was doing everything she could to put herself across as being a great candidate for a girlfriend.

That’s because I put myself across in a way to be approached like that. If you want to be approached by a real girl, make sure you keep yourself presentable. Make sure you’re not fat. Go to the gym.

And maybe then you’ll meet a real girl who loves you for you, like my girl loves me.

The fact that she’d shown interest in me and she was the first to make the move gave me a lot of confidence about the type of person she was. I have heard stories about how people lost all their money in Thailand.

So, I had certain things to look out for when I was out – how to know if things were right, what I needed to look out for. She wasn’t displaying any of those signs. So, when she asked me if I would like to go out on a date with her, I gladly gave her my phone number.

Building a Real Relationship

She called me the next day and we went out for dinner. Yes, I paid for dinner, but I understood enough about the culture of the country and how things are that that’s just how it is as a man. That was my job, and that’s the cultural norm of the country, and I felt fortunate to be in that position.

Things progressed very quickly after that. We went on more dates and started to get very serious. Yes, one of the first questions I asked her was what did she do for work. She wasn’t a bar girl.

She worked in an office. In fact, she worked for one of the big mobile phone companies. She wasn’t a big executive or anything, but she earned 20,000 baht a month working a respectable job.

I found out that she was from Buriram, a beautiful little village about 25 minutes from the city. She’d worked hard at school. She was able to go to university and get a degree, and she got a good job because of that.

Everything she told me was everything I wanted her to be. She was a wonderful person, and I felt very fortunate to have met her.

Although at the time I wasn’t aware just how serious we would become.

She didn’t move in with me straight away. We dated for 6 months before she moved in, and when she did, she continued to work. I could tell you how much she loved me and I loved her as well.

You know, I know the feeling.

Six months went by – a whirlwind romance – and two people who were perfect for each other had found each other. I hope nobody is starting to feel jealous, but life was perfect and still is because I respect Thai culture and how things are done in Thailand.

I embrace it and I love it, and I’ve never done anything stupid.

The Engagement

We lived together for four months. Our relationship was going from strength to strength. And she’s still working.

I’m still looking for different hobbies to keep me occupied. I’m having a great time. I didn’t want to go and drink in the bars all the time.

That’s not what I retired for. I was there to learn about the country that I loved, and I wanted to do lots of things that would make me the best partner for my girlfriend.

After 4 months of living together – this probably took us to early 2023 – I proposed to her.

I wanted to solidify our relationship because it kept going from strength to strength. My girlfriend was in tears when I proposed. I took her to a very nice restaurant one Friday evening, and I did everything how you should do things.

I got down on one knee and I asked her to make me the happiest man in the world.

I wanted to propose to her in a way that she might have dreamed of being proposed to. She broke into tears and she said she’d love to marry me.

She was very happy, and that made me very happy. I treated her like I would want any other girl regardless of where they came from. And I think that makes all the difference.

Just because she’s from Thailand doesn’t mean that she’s any different to any of the other girls in the world.

I think it’s very important to say that. But when we decided to get married, I wanted to do everything the proper way. I wanted to do everything with the utmost respect directed towards the people who so graciously let me live in their wonderful country.

Who was I to try to impose my ways on them? I didn’t think I was in a position to do that. Then there will be some bigot who thinks he knows best, who thinks that where he’s from, things are better.

Even if they are, that gives you no right to impose your ways on people. Get over yourselves.

Meeting the Family and Sin Sod

After we got engaged, we arranged to go and meet her family. That would be the first time I would meet them, and I couldn’t wait to let them know how much I loved their daughter. This was not your typical relationship in Thailand.

This was a real one, and I assumed her parents would be very happy because of that fact.

About a month after getting engaged, that’s when we went to her village. She had arranged a few days off work so we could spend a decent amount of time there.

Of course, because I was retired, I didn’t have work to do. I could go anytime, but I wanted to go when she was ready to. Who was I to tell her to take time off work when she wasn’t ready to do that?

As part of our engagement, I bought a car for my soon-to-be wife. I bought her a Toyota Fortuner, the big four-wheel drive one. It cost me 1.6 million baht, and I put it in her name.

That was a gift from me to her to show my commitment to her. I know I could have put it in my name, but why would I do that? I wanted to make my wife happy.

Of course, I can use the car anytime I want to. I even used it today to drive somewhere. So, I feel bad for the guys who don’t understand how to keep a relationship.

She never asked me to buy her a car. She used to go on the MRT from Sukhumvit to her office in Ratchada every day. And even though the traffic on the road is absolutely shocking, I am fully aware that having a car in Thailand, even if it takes longer to get somewhere, matters more than convenience.

Embracing Village Life

We set off in the car to Buriram. We’re both really happy and smiling with each other, talking about the future and everything we could do. Everything was so exciting, and I could tell just how happy she was.

When we finally got to her village, I was dumbfounded about how different it was. I wasn’t expecting it to be that different, but I embraced the difference, and I loved it. Even if I didn’t like it, I loved it.

I loved the fact that it was so different to anything I’d seen before. And I loved the fact that the people did things differently, and I embraced these differences.

You might hear a story about someone talking about how the house next door plays loud music and the bass will make the wall shake. Embrace it.

You might hear people talking about how they don’t like that they burn garden waste and plastic rubbish and the smoke comes into your house. Embrace it and enjoy it for what it is – something different.

Her family were wonderful when I met them.

Her mother and father were both in their 60s, and she had an older sister who lived in the village. She did a bit of work in Bangkok and spoke English slightly, but she got bored of Bangkok and moved back to the village. She much preferred the life there.

I could understand why she preferred life in the village. It was such a peaceful, idyllic location. Who wouldn’t want to live somewhere like that?

After exchanging pleasantries, I brought them a gift from Bangkok. Just a little bit of something as a gesture for meeting them. You might think that sounds stupid, but have you been to Thailand and watched Thai people interacting with other Thai people and the things they do together?

If I was Thai, that would mean my parents were Thai, and my parents would have been the ones who would have taken the gift for my girlfriend’s parents. But because my parents had already passed away, I had to replace that and play the part of them to give them the experience they wanted for their daughter. That’s the thing many people don’t understand.

I knew everything about sin sod. I was expecting to pay maybe 200,000 baht. She had no kids and had never been married.

I had to mention that because that’s what guys talk about all the time – “I had to pay sin sod yet she already had children.” You know what I mean? But I don’t think guys get that in rural settings in Thailand, that’s what they’ve done for generations.

These people have not yet caught up to how things are done elsewhere.

And it’s because they’re so unaware of what goes on in the outside world that being in a place like that is so appealing and so attractive for somebody like me. I’m seeing different people living their lives a way I’ve never seen before.

Why would I come in and try to change them? I didn’t want to change them. And if something happens that I don’t like, I actually like that.

I like the pain it causes because I understand things are different.

It was because of that that I did agree to spend a little bit more money than I had planned for sin sod. I wanted her parents to have the best day ever, and my girlfriend.

I wanted her to have the best day ever. And if her parents were extra happy, of course, she’s going to be happy as well. You make sacrifices, and when you do what people expect and even better than that, they will treat you better than you would expect.

That’s what I need to say.

But I did agree to give 750,000 baht in sin sod, and I also gave them five baht weight of gold. Some people think that’s a lot.

But what other people don’t understand about that is that in the village, her parents are now going to be considered a little bit higher up than everybody else in the village. In turn, that means her parents are going to feel like they have some kind of status in the village. And now, because of this newfound status, they’re going to show more respect towards me because by doing that, they can keep up this image that they have found themselves in.

And they’re doing that through love of their daughter and me. That’s how I see it. And I wish everybody would see it like that because that’s how it is.

The Wedding

The wedding – that was great. Everything I wanted it to be and then some. And my girlfriend, now my wife, she cried when we were sitting in front of the monks and they tied the string around our wrists.

She was in tears and she looked at me and said, “Thank you for making my wedding the best wedding I could ever have.” And she said she really appreciated the fact that I embraced how things worked in the village and how things were done there. And that made her family really, really happy.

I could see she meant it. I could see she was telling the truth.

And if you want to be one of those guys who goes there and hates everything, you’re going to make everybody in her family extremely uncomfortable because you don’t want to do things the way they are always done there.

To the guys that say you’re paying for everything, so it should be done your way – it’s not about the money, is it? It’s about respect.

So when I saw her with a tear going down her cheek, looking happy and telling me she was happy, that was everything I wanted, and it made it so worth it.

And what an amazing day we had. And get this – something most guys will never tell you. I would say we had about 200 people attending our wedding.

The whole village came. Some of her friends from Bangkok. I didn’t have any of my friends there, but that was fine with me.

And even people from further afield came.

I paid for the whole wedding – 250,000 baht I spent for that. Yet, most people are not going to tell you that when someone comes to a wedding, they bring an envelope with them, and inside that envelope, they’re going to put a bit of money.

So, when the wedding was finished, we had over 200 envelopes with money inside. Most people gave only 100 baht, but some gave a thousand. Her sister gave 5,000 in an envelope.

Her mother did one for 10,000 baht, and her father did one for 25,000 baht. And a few of the higher-ups in the village, they did them for 500 each.

So that meant although I spent 250,000 baht, we got back 180,000 of that.

So I just gave that to my wife. Getting married in the village was the best day of my life. And I could tell just how happy her family were that I respected and cared about their culture. In return, I could feel they respected and cared about me more.

I really loved them.

Down in Bangkok, we got married at the district office, and after that I was able to get the extension of stay for being married. Before I was using the retirement extension, but I didn’t like locking up 800,000 in the bank when I only needed 400,000 in it.

Building a Life Together

Life as a married man just got better after that. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have met such a perfect girl. Not only that, a perfect girl who loved me and wanted to be with me.

And over the next few months, I started to think like I don’t really want to be in Bangkok anymore. I felt an even bigger connection to her being married to her. And I missed the village, and I wanted to go and live up there.

I know she talked about that lots of times – how she hoped to live back in the village one day, how she’s more happy in the village, and I could see she was when we were there.

So it was after about 3 months that we started talking about the future and moving up to the village, building a house, and we even started talking again about having a family. I did feel like I might be too old, but my wife told me it wasn’t really a problem.

She was younger than me, and she’d always wanted a family, and I felt like she deserved that, and who was I to tell her any otherwise.

After 3 months back, and she’s still working, we hadn’t been on a honeymoon yet. That was a very important part of getting married, and I wanted to take her to a very special place. I surprised her with a two-week trip to Japan.

That’s always somewhere she’d talk about wanting to go. So, when she came back from work one day and I told her, “How would you feel about going to Japan in a few days’ time?” She was very happy and said she’d love to go.

She was so appreciative and so kind towards me, always acting like the perfect wife, and she still does.

We went to Japan for 2 weeks, mainly in Tokyo, but we also went up to Mount Fuji, which was very beautiful. I had an incredible time with her in Japan.

I’d never been there before, and that was always her number one place she wanted to go, and we had a wonderful time together.

Moving to the Village Permanently

When we returned, I told her I think it’s about time she quit her job and we could go and live in the village. Let’s take our relationship to the next level yet again, and we can think about our future. Initially, she was hesitant, saying she liked working, but I could tell that when I said that, that’s exactly what she wanted to do.

So, it didn’t take much convincing to tell her, “Let’s go.”

She worked for another month, and after that, I gave up the condo I rented, and – get this – I got my deposit back. Okay, I only got half of it back.

The owner of the condo where I lived said there was a very slight bit of damage on the kitchen counter. And while I couldn’t really see much of it, there was a tiny scratch there. So I agreed that they could keep half of the deposit.

But when in Rome – I think you can see that “when in Rome” is a very important thing for me and how I live my life in Thailand.

Driving back up to Buriram this time with the plan to live there permanently was very exciting. My wife still talked about how happy she was that she had the Toyota Fortuner that I bought for her.

She was so appreciative of that, and she was the one who always drove. I was happy to sit in the passenger seat when she drove. She was Thai and knew how the roads in Thailand worked more than I did, and I loved being chauffeured around.

We went straight to the village. Her parents were so happy to see her, but also they were happy to see me. When they saw me, both her parents had really big smiles on their faces.

And they invited me to sit down and they brought some food and said, “Go on, eat some.” And her father went to the fridge and pulled out a beer and gave it to me and said, “Cheers, chok dee.” What incredible people they are.

I understand what they are, what kind of people they are, and how fantastic they are. And I love them because of it.

Full disclosure, I will admit – when her father went about 5 meters away and took a brush and started sweeping leaves into a big pile and then lit it on fire and the smoke came into the house over everybody sitting there and I started coughing a bit – I understood that I wasn’t there for that.

It might not be like that where I come from, but that’s what they do here. So, who am I to tell them that that’s wrong? I had to accept it, and I was happy to. You have to be happy to accept things even if you don’t like them.

Buying Land and Building Our House

What we needed to work out, though, was we wanted to build a house here. We didn’t have any land yet. We were offered some land for free by her father, but it was a little bit too big for what we were looking for.

And he used that land to grow things, so we didn’t want him to stop growing things just so he could give the land to us. But he was prepared to give us the land completely free of charge. The only thing we would have needed to pay for would be the land transfer costs, which are a lot cheaper when it’s been transferred between family members.

When people know that you are looking for land and if they have some for sale, they will tell you about it. And that’s lots of land to look at. We looked at lots of land.

Sometimes you might like it and sometimes you might not. But we weren’t rushing into buying anything. It had to be like we wanted it to be.

We might need to make some compromises.

And the only compromise I did make was the amount of money I spent on the land. I only wanted to spend 3 to 400,000 baht, but I ended up spending 900,000 baht for half a rai in the village – approximately 800 square meters.

But I thought it was a great price for what it was.

I have to mention one thing, though. The last time when I was in Bangkok, I was speaking to a guy and I told him about the land that I bought for me and my wife.

I felt extremely offended when he started laughing at me because he said I spent way too much money for land. No, I didn’t. He obviously has no idea which village I was in.

Just 20 minutes out of Buriram city, and this was land suitable for building on. It wasn’t farmland. We could already build on it.

So, I thought it was a great place and I was happy with it.

I can remember when we went to get the land put on my wife’s name and how exciting it was for both of us. When we walked out of the land office, my wife said, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

And she was talking about how lucky she was that she’d met a guy who respected her and her family and her culture.

By the end of 2023, we already had our house built and we moved in. I spent 4 million baht on the construction, and it is a nice house in the village. My wife is incredibly happy with it, as am I.

I allowed her brother to move in. He was still in his 20s and was struggling to find his way in life, but I was more than happy to allow him to stay with us until he managed to pull himself together. I will admit that he is still living there today.

Yet, he is my wife’s family, so who am I to tell him not to live in the house that I built and paid for.

He is fully aware that he’s able to live there, and he knows what’s mine. What I mean by that is, again, I have to talk about other guys.

He went into my fridge and took my beer. The only thing I’ve said to anybody in the village is if you take something from the fridge and it’s the last one, you either have to tell me about it or replace it. I don’t want to find myself in the uncomfortable position of going for a beer and there isn’t one.

7-Eleven is too far away and the local village shop is already closed. That’s all I ask. And I can’t remember one time when I went to the fridge and something that I thought was there wasn’t.

There was always at least one left. So, I thought that was a great compromise. They never take the last one.

I mean, they never do. So, I don’t understand what the problem with all these guys is.

Our Financial Arrangement

At this point, I really can’t believe how lucky I am. I’ve got my perfect wife, a great house, an amazing family around me, beautiful scenery, and the ability to do what I want when I want. When my wife stopped working, I agreed to do things very differently.

I have a certain income that comes in every month. By this point, I’d spent most of my savings on the car and the house and the wedding, but I had my income coming in, and that goes into a joint bank account.

It’s her job to pay the bills – the electric, the internet, and everything like that.

And then whatever’s left is just there and has to last till the end of the month, and that’s it. She can take out as much as she wants, but that’s how much there is every month. And that’s how it goes.

I can also take out money when I want. We can’t go over that budget, and she’s fully aware of that. Every single month, that’s how it works.

And I feel great that she can be in control of the money and leave me to relax.

It’s the equivalent of about 90,000 baht every month. Our bills are about 10,000 baht a month.

On a very hot month when the AC is on, it might be slightly more. So, we still have 80,000 baht left every single month. She does the shopping.

She does everything like that, and that’s how it has been ever since.

But at the start of 2024, we started talking about having a family again. I was 54 at this point, so I felt like I might be a little bit too old.

But my wife convinced me I wasn’t. She was 37 then, and she’d never had children. It was her dream.

So although it wasn’t my first choice of things to do, I was reassured by the fact that her family were all around and they were happy to help all the time. And I thought it was the best thing to do.

So, a few months later, she was pregnant.

We were both so happy about that. I couldn’t believe that I was going to have a child for the first time. And she was so happy because that’s what she’d always wanted and never had.

Our son was born in November 2024, and it was a very strange feeling to be in a position where you have a child for the first time, and you’ve never experienced it before. But my wife is a great mom, and I’d like to think I’m a great dad. But the main thing is her family are incredible.

They adore my son more than anything. They do anything for him. When he gets of an age, he will be going to the local village school until he’s maybe seven, and then we’ll think about taking him to a better school a bit further away.

My Wife’s Business

At the end of 2024, my wife was already back to her normal self. She decided she wanted to have a business. She didn’t need to do anything, and she was fully aware that she didn’t need to do anything.

But she was 38. She was still of an age where she had 10 or 15 years of working in front of her. And it’s because she wanted to do something that I didn’t want to stop her.

We had such a fantastic support group from her family around us who were able to look after our son when she was doing things.

I felt like it was only right to support her in her dreams of opening a business. As I said, I had about 90,000 baht every month coming in.

I still had my 400,000 baht for the visa, which is still there and will remain there forever. And I had £30,000 left in savings. And I spoke to my wife about it and I was clear and said this is the last of the savings.

We still have the income coming in, but if we spend this, there’s not going to be any money to do anything else. So I hope you understand that after that we’ll have 90,000 baht a month and that’s it. I wanted to be clear with her about that.

I wanted her to be fully aware of the situation.

As soon as she said she understood what I meant and when she was aware that from then on we would only have 90,000 baht a month – that was it. I was more than happy to give her £20,000 out of those £30,000 remaining.

I will always have the £10,000 as an emergency – for example, if I need to go to hospital. But I gave her £20,000 to start her business. And so far, it’s going well.

No, she didn’t want to open a restaurant or a bar or a shop or start growing rice – nothing like that. Although I would have supported her if that’s what she wanted to do. She wanted to start a business selling things online.

You might see it in Thailand – people selling things on TikTok or on Facebook. And that’s what she’s doing now. And the £20,000 was perfect for her to get all the stock she needed to sell.

And she also bought a pickup. So when she went to buy things, she could pile them in the back.

I’m not going to tell you what she sells because she’s doing okay.

But she’s making now 20,000 baht a month, which was the same as she earned at her job. That 20,000 goes into the same bank that my 90,000 does, and we both can dip into that and take what we want. That’s going to also pay for our son’s schooling, and that’s what we have.

And my wife is contributing to our marriage just like I am.

That brings us to today. We’re still living in our house in Buriram, which is a great place – the best place I’ve ever been.

Very fortunate to live here. My wife and I get along just as we did when we met. No, she hasn’t changed after we built the house.

No, she hasn’t changed after we had our son. Okay, she has changed in some ways, but these are normal ways that people change after time. But she’s still the same person I fell in love with.

She’s still the love of my life, and I’m still the love of her life. And things are going amazingly. I don’t understand why all these guys seem to fail.

I embraced Thailand.

I embrace rural Thailand for what it was. And I will fully admit that there are lots of things on first glance that I don’t like and I would change. But I understand that it’s not for me to make any changes.

It’s for the people to change in their own time, and people are changing ever so slowly. I love the village life and how things are there, and I overlook the negative things that go along with that as being just part of it, but it’s for me to accept.

The Things I Don’t Like (But Accept)

I do want to be fully open with you. Maybe this way you will actually use this story, but I must admit there are things I don’t like in the village. I don’t like when people burn all the time and smoke goes into our house and garden. That happens all the time and I don’t like it.

But I don’t say anything or get angry. It is what it is, and I knew what it was before I got into things.

I don’t like when people start playing music very loud, but I just leave, go for a meal, and come back later.

I’m not there to try to change people. I’m not there to try to impose my ways on people. That’s not what I went to Thailand for.

I went to Thailand because I loved it and I loved how it was. And if there were some things I don’t like, I learned to accept them because that’s how they are.

I am so fortunate to be able to live in Thailand with my great wife who is not with me for the money.

I think I’ve been perfectly clear with you throughout writing this that my wife is with me because she loves me. There’s nothing that I’ve said at all that anyone could point to as being my wife is with me for money. She’s with me for love, and our family, and we go brilliantly together.

But I am angry. I am very angry that people don’t understand that when you move to Thailand, you have to adapt. Some people might look at something and think that it’s backwards.

It’s strange. And these people should be taught how to do things properly. Yet, how do you define properly?

The safest for your health? How people have started to do things in the West compared to Thailand? I don’t know what you’d expect.

People shouldn’t be told how to do things that they’ve been doing themselves for years. Let people be people and accept it for what it is. If you can’t do that, you’ve got no business being in Thailand.

If you’re one of the guys who sent in a story saying how your wife took and stole money from you, I bet it’s your fault. I did things properly. And as you can already see, my wife has never had any money out of me.

Everything we have is ours and we both enjoy it.

I do know that there will be some people who say, “What happens if your money runs out? What happens then?”

But my 90,000 baht a month will never run out. That’s what I get indefinitely, so I don’t have to think about that. But I do know if I didn’t have any money left, my wife would try even harder at her business and make sure we were both okay together.

She’s not with me for the money.

All I have bought for her since we’ve been together is the car – but I can use that as well – about £20,000 of gold jewelry – but that’s an investment that’s gone up in value since I bought most of it – and the land and the house – but that’s where we live, and that will belong to my son when he’s older. So, what’s the problem?

I gave money to her family when we got married. And sometimes I will admit to giving her mother and father and her sister and sometimes her cousin – she’s got two cousins – I will admit to giving them little bits of money every now and then, but that comes out of the 90,000 baht that comes in. So I don’t see any problem with that.

I invested in things like that because I wanted to be in the position I’m in now, and I’m happy.

Don’t you dare tell me I’m not happy because I am. There’s nowhere I would rather be than in this house, in this village, with my wife and son and her family.

Do things properly when you go to Thailand and understand how it works. If you do that, you’re halfway there to being successful in Thailand. Listen to me as a shining example of what to do when you go to Thailand.

Don’t make stupid mistakes, and don’t stay with someone who is there for the money. My wife is with me for love, and that’s what you really need.

The Turn for the Worse

There are going to be lots of people gloating in my misery, and to them I say bring it on. It’s been just under a year and things took a turn for the worse. Before anyone says “I told you so,” there were a few extenuating circumstances completely out of my control that caused this to happen.

So, let me get right into that.

Was I in denial? I don’t think I was in denial.

I just thought what I was doing I should be doing because I didn’t see anything wrong. I did my best to accept life in the village. 50% of me loved it more than anything.

And I’m not trying to justify anything here, but I really did love living in the village. When I referenced the fact that I was willing to accept certain things that I didn’t like, I will admit that they started to take their toll on me as the months passed.

I was never the sort of person – and that was why I was so sure – because I always looked at the way people did things and accepted them and looked at them for what they were.

But as time went by and the constant issues that went along with living in a place like that continued to happen, it did take its toll. I’m not saying that this caused me to face any problems together with my wife. But I am saying that as the months dragged on, it got to the point where I was sick and tired of all the things that people did there that I just wasn’t used to.

But I persevered and pushed through and accepted it for what it was because I knew what I was getting myself into when I did what I did.

As you know from my story, I invested pretty much my life savings into the village – the car, the wedding, and gold for my wife. And I invested what I had left while saving a little bit into a business for my wife that started out going great.

I was very proud of my wife for having that can-do attitude, for turning her nose up at people who said she was going to fail, because she started out doing very well. And even though we had just had a child – which was something very different to what I was expecting it to be – late nights, very early mornings, and not necessarily like the retirement I was expecting – I wouldn’t change that for the world.

But my wife started her business and it was doing well.

She wasn’t making a lot of money like I told you, but she was making something, and that was going into our joint bank account. And when we had anything to pay for, everything came out of that bank account.

The First Sign of Trouble

After I invested into that business for her, we kind of sat down together and talked about the future. I thought I only had a little bit of savings left for an emergency that might crop up. I told my wife that I wanted to cut back on helping people in the family and cut back on any other expenses that were not directly related to me, her, and our child.

I know people will look at me and laugh, and I read the comments before and understood that many people thought I was insane about the amount of money I was giving to members of her family as and when they needed it. But I didn’t care what people said, because to me, I had never seen anything to show me that my wife wasn’t who she had always been with me.

They say everything is perfect until it’s not.

There’s no middle ground between things being perfect and not. When something happens, it will hit you like a ton of bricks. And I would say that does accurately represent my feelings now, given the fact that when I told my wife we needed to cut back, stop spending as much, and try to build a buffer – an even bigger emergency buffer than the approximate £10,000 I had left – my wife didn’t take that very well.

Up until that point, we’d been a perfect couple together. I thought she was with me for love. I was with her for love.

And I guess I didn’t see any other side because anytime anything was asked for, I would always without fail provide. There wasn’t one time that I didn’t provide when it was requested of me, because I just thought that that was what my job was to do and I had the money to do it, and we were building our future together in the village.

After investing in her business and seeing my savings dip as low as they did, it was the most sensible thing to do to cut back on what we spend on a monthly basis, because what I had coming in would have been enough to add more money to my pile of savings to the tune of around £1,000 a month.

We could spend £1,000, save £1,000, and my wife was making money from her business – around 20,000 baht a month at the time – and I thought that would be enough for us to live on.

And also, I thought my wife would understand that we need to prioritize building up an extra buffer just in case of any eventuality. Also, now we had a child, we would need to start thinking about their future as well.

You can’t get free schooling in Thailand. I mean, you can, but it’s not very good. So, you need to pay for a private school, especially when your child is like mine – not fully Thai.

So, that’s something that we were going to need to pay for when the time came. There’s also insurance that I want to pay for for our child, and also thinking about saving for their long-term education.

And I thought my wife would be on the same page as me, because up until this point, we were perfectly on the same page.

It was nothing that would make me think anything other than what I already thought, which was I had the perfect relationship.

When my wife didn’t take it well that I wanted to stop giving money to her family… Up until this point, I’d given so much money to the family.

Basically, anytime it was asked of me, I would give it. But I thought that I was giving it to them because I wanted to, not because it was expected. I thought I was doing everything right.

And that’s the problem. Because how do you know you’re doing something wrong when there’s nothing to show you that what you’re doing is wrong?

My wife said to me that we can’t just stop giving money to them.

She went on to talk about all the things that people in her family needed to pay for – her parents and her cousins. It was as if they became reliant on me giving money to them, and I wasn’t aware that they were reliant on it. I just thought that they were having this money, but it could be curtailed any time as and when I saw fit.

I didn’t want to argue with my wife and told her I understood, but she didn’t seem to be able to understand when I said I wanted to start rebuilding our savings. I told her I was happy to rebuild it in our own personal account. Everything went into our joint account in terms of our income, and I wanted to build that up just for the future and for our child.

She told me not to worry about it, saying that now we have her income from the business as well as my income, which was guaranteed – and it is, and I still get it. Yet she said, “What’s the problem? We can pay for everything we need to pay for out of this.”

That was the first time I didn’t really understand exactly what my wife was thinking. For example, when our child goes to school, the school in the area that we’ve seen that I would be comfortable sending him to is around 50,000 baht per term. There’s also an enrollment fee and a few other fees to go along with it.

So, in a few years’ time, we’re going to have to pay around 100,000 baht as a first payment to the school. I can’t use my emergency savings for that. And if we don’t save, the money that I get in on a monthly basis isn’t going to be enough to pay for this, let alone everything else on top.

So, we need to start building for these eventualities.

Yet, when I started talking about this, it was as if everything I thought was happening wasn’t even happening at all.

I have to make it clear that up until this point, everything I said before was 100% accurate and true as to that moment in time.

That was honestly how I felt and how I believed things would be. I was happy with my income, happy with our house and our car, happy with everything that we were doing together, and also happy to help my wife with her business. I was happy to be helping her family as and when I was doing it.

But perhaps I didn’t see my wife asking for money for her family to be what it actually was, which was my wife asking for money for her family. I thought she was asking me if it was okay if I could give money to her family, understanding that I could also say no as well as yes.

The problem was I never did say no.

And when I found this out about my wife after I told her I want to start building up some savings and she said it wasn’t acceptable because we need to help the family continuously because they’d grown accustomed to it and that was just how she expected it to remain – I did take a little bit of a hit to my sanity and to my ego after that, because I understood how it looks when I said everything was fantastic. And now I’m finding out that perhaps I made quite a few errors of judgment. Perhaps I just made one very big error of judgment in that I thought we were a couple who loved each other and were with each other for love, not money.

And that’s the thing. If I continued to give money to her family as I had always done, I would have never found out the truth about this anyway.

I tried to come to a compromise.

A compromise is always very important, as I’ve always said, especially in relationships. So, I said, “Let’s tone down what we give over the course of the next few months to the point in 3 months when they’re not getting anything.” When you’re doing something thinking that you’re doing it because it’s your choice and your idea, you will defend your actions.

And that’s what I was doing. But I didn’t realize that I was doing it as an expectation. So, she wasn’t even happy with this compromise and said she’s going to have to work even harder now so that she could step in and help.

You have to understand this as well – because while her family had land and a house and other things, we had people who were getting money from me sometimes who just laid in the hammock all day not doing anything. Why should they get money? They weren’t working.

And if anything, I just thought I was giving this money and they were using it to better themselves, not just for living expenses because they couldn’t be bothered to work – which it turned out they were doing.

So, this compromise didn’t work. But I put my foot down because I thought I was in control of the relationship and said we need to do this.

We need to save for our child’s future. And my wife reluctantly agreed that she would tell her family. But she said she’s going to have to work a lot harder now because of it.

I did try to tell her if we can save up to a certain amount then we can maybe look at this again, but we need to put the future first and be careful. And it was as if she just didn’t know what I was talking about, and that was the first time we didn’t see eye to eye about anything.

I also need to stress that things weren’t dreadful at this time.

It was just a bit of a realization on my part that I’d been mistaken and also that I’d been doing things potentially by force as opposed to being happy to do so. I was happy to do so, but I thought everything I gave was more than I should give, and therefore if I stopped it would be fine. I didn’t think what I gave was expected, and if I stopped it wouldn’t be fine.

So, I got that very badly wrong.

The reason why I needed to talk about that at length was because it was this little issue – which shouldn’t have been an issue at all – that led to everything else. Granted, I will have to admit that I was wrong.

And that’s very embarrassing for me to say, given the fact I was so cocky about myself before because I couldn’t see anything happening in my life that would give me cause for concern. For just under $3,000 a month in rural Thailand of guaranteed income, there shouldn’t have been anything for me to worry about.

But now, because my wife wants to start working harder in order to help her family out so that I could cut back – and her family are helping her look after our child, and of course I’m doing a lot of that as well – yet, why weren’t they working?

Why were they just expecting money for nothing?

The Loans and the Betrayal

I might as well get right to it as to what caused everything to actually become a lot worse than I ever imagined. A few months ago – quite well into 2025 at this point – I found out that my wife had taken out a loan to expand her business. She hadn’t consulted me about this, which really hurt.

I couldn’t believe she didn’t tell me about it. And when she eventually did, it was quite a concerning revelation.

She’d taken out a loan against some of the land that we had.

It was quite a large parcel in Thailand terms anyway. And she raised a million baht, and she was going to use that to get more stock and to broaden her presence online. I thought that was it – until I found out she took a loan against the car as well.

It was hers. She could do that without me knowing. And that was for another 400,000 baht.

She invested all this money into her business. Although she did admit that 250,000 of that saw its way to different members of her family. And now she had all this stock and she was struggling to shift it.

She was making around 20,000 a month in the early stages of her business. But then what she was doing was being swamped by so many other people trying to do the same thing.

And when I found out about this, I was only being told about it because she couldn’t afford to pay these loans back.

A huge amount of interest needed to be paid, and the payments – unbelievably, for everything – was around 47,000 a month. She’d taken these loans out for 4 years, completely convinced that she was going to be making around 100,000 a month from the business. Yet, what actually happened was instead of making 20,000 like she was in the first few months, it slowly trickled down to the point of reaching less than 10,000.

I was very shocked when I found this out, but unfortunately, when I just said to her, “That gold that I invested in for you a while ago – it’s worth a lot more money today than it was before. So, we’ll just go and sell a bit of that and pay the loans back, and it’ll just be one of those things.” I found out then though that that gold had been sold a long time ago and a lot of that money had also made its way to various family members and in other locations.

So, there was nothing for her to pay this loan back with. And if it wasn’t paid back, the land and the car would be taken.

And at that moment, I had my savings of around £10,000 as well as my income, and that was it.

I could have just about afforded it out of my income, which would have meant no family member getting money again, no saving for our child’s future, and no life for four whole years – paying this back for my wife. I was about to say that that’s what we’re going to have to do. But it’s the way that she expected me to fix this problem that was actually my light bulb moment.

The light bulb moment when I was there with her and our child, and my wife was my wife – until there wasn’t enough money for her to be my wife anymore. And she did some stupid things and expected me to fix it. But the problem was I couldn’t fix it because I didn’t have the money to do so.

Leaving to Work and Pay the Debts

Around about 3 months ago, I took the very difficult decision to go to work at home to pay back these loans that my wife had taken out. When I had to do that, I was doing so on the understanding that the only way for me to continue my life is to be with my wife. That house is where most of my life savings are invested, as well as other things that I put money into.

And also, I have to think about our child’s future.

I reckon it’s going to take me another 18 months to pay back those loans, maybe another 6 months to top up the savings. And while I speak to my wife every day, and we are most definitely still together and will remain together, I think it was a sight of me having to leave when she finally understood that what she did perhaps wasn’t the right thing to do – just blindly thinking that I would always be able to step in and save things for her.

I don’t look at my wife in the same way anymore after this – because how can I?

I do know that if my income was double what it was and we continued to give money to her family, this wouldn’t have happened and I would have been oblivious to absolutely everything. So, in a way, I suppose it is a small price to pay to make me understand what the truth of all this was. And the truth is quite difficult to come to terms with, especially after I was so sure that what I was doing was right and nothing could go wrong.

I miss seeing my wife. I miss our child. I miss our house.

But what choice did I have? I’m going to suffer through the next few years, pay everything back, and after that, I’m going to go back and live in our house again, because my wife has promised that she will wait for me. And I have promised that I will go back.

I still find it really upsetting, given the fact that life was perfect right up until it wasn’t. And the only way I can describe this feeling is like running as fast as I can, thinking that ground will always be under me. I keep running and running and running, and time keeps going by, and the ground is perfectly smooth.

Nothing on the ground there to trip me up – until all of a sudden the last step that I made, there was no ground anymore, because I’d reached the edge of a cliff and I fell down it, because that was the only thing that could happen. But when I was running, I didn’t even know what a cliff was. All that there were things like that out there where the ground wouldn’t be the same anymore.

I’m only being figurative here, but that was what it was like. I had no idea until it was already too late.

I am safe in the knowledge that my wife and I will be together forever. Safe in the knowledge that I’m able to speak to my child a lot so that their English ability will be able to stay at a good level until I get back.

And I’m safe in the knowledge that I will be back in Thailand as soon as I can. But it’s a problem I’m facing head-on. And when the time came, I was prepared to try to fix it.

I still love my wife. I’m still happy with my decisions. But I made a few errors of judgment.

And that I admit.

This will need a follow-up, I suppose, when I get back to Thailand, but I think that’s at least another 2 years away at minimum. I’m counting down the days and looking at this positively, because it has opened my eyes a bit so that the next time anything happens, I will be able to secure myself on a more sure footing than I did before.