Stickman Readers' Submissions May 5th, 2006

True Love To Treachery – An Internet Tale

By BH



The following is my story of a 2 year relationship with a Thai girl. It has many common elements with so many of these relationships. I can suggest 3 good books for readers to look at. I can see snippets of my own experience all through these books. The books are “Money Still Number One” by Neil Hutchison, “Lady Of Pattaya” by Michael Schemmann (some real horror stories there) and “Thailand Fever” by Paiboon Publishing Co. I’m grateful my experience was relatively mild compared to some of the accounts in “Lady Of Pattaya”.

He Clinic Bangkok


At the start Kat seemed to be different. She had never had a farang boyfriend (I think!) and hadn’t had a Thai boyfriend for maybe 3 years (I think!). She asked me several times why no Thai men ever approached her at discos and other places. Some of her flatmates at least were “mia nois”, but she wasn’t getting the income from that source.


Her “job” at a wedding studio pays peanuts and is very casual, maybe a fortnight’s work every 2 months. Only a few thousand baht, much of it spent on travel to work and buying food at work, but she shares an apartment in Bangkok with up to 6 other girls, 5 of them bar girls (or the next best thing to it). They pool everything and food doesn’t cost much. There are other girls in the equation, her best friend from school days, also an Internet savvy girl who lives in the same building, and a friend from out of town. All of them except one are basically earning money from sex (to use farang language). They are all nice, friendly people, but they all come with the usual bar girl baggage.


Kat is the odd one out. She isn’t strictly a bar girl. She’s never worked Patpong, Nana Plaza, Thaniya, or anywhere else like that (as far as I know). Why? Maybe she was shy about her weight! At about the time I met her, her girlfriends had just about convinced her to do a trip to Singapore with them. This “Singapore thing” entails taking a 2 week trip to Singapore, doing whatever is required and coming back with up to 100,000 baht. A tidy sum for 2 weeks on your back.

CBD bangkok


As I found out over time, Kat has a major flaw in her character. She is easily led by others. She does not seem to have strong values of her own. She sees her friends getting “unbelievable” amounts of money, gold and other gifts, and she really wants to be like them. She wants to show her friends her bank account entries, the gold and the “goodies’ HER boyfriend has given her, so she can be like them. (Like all of these girls, they lie a lot to each other about this too). Her best friend has regular clients from Japan booking her services, and also has a local guy paying her rent and taking her out to dinner regularly. Her Internet savvy friend may have several men on tap she’s working on at one time. She got married to one recently, but there were legal problems. So it’s back to the chat rooms to pick up another/a few other possible candidates. Some of Kat’s flatmates have weekend Thai boyfriends who give them money. If they don’t give enough, the girls can go to Patpong to work to supplement.


Poor Kat seems to have had little of this (seems like Thai men like their women slim and have a lot of choices) and the fact that she couldn’t speak English meant she couldn’t talk to farangs.


Then she met me and things changed. We met at a disco during Songkran 2 years ago. One of her friends introduced me to her and she literally “followed me home” and never left. I honestly didn’t want a relationship, but she forced me into it! Can you believe that? It’s actually true, I swear it. She would stay for a couple of days, then sense that I didn’t want her around and go off to stay with her friends for a day, maybe two. Finally, I became accustomed to having her around and the “softening up process” began. She told me how much she loved me, etc., etc., She did all sorts of things for me and didn’t really ask for money. I think the first period of our relationship was probably one of the happiest times of my life. If there was the slightest hint of something bad between us, she would make sure we talked about it before going to sleep. She didn’t want to stay with her friends, she wanted to stay with me all the time. She was happy playing housewife.


Within a very short time I was giving her 5K baht to look after the house, then I thought that she needed 10K, so she could have something for herself. I’m not sure how the next change occurred, but the 10K then became “salary”. It was money put into her bank account for her to do anything she wanted with. I then paid for everything else, including her taxi fares and any special requirements (e.g., medical expenses) on top of this.

wonderland clinic


The next “salary” increase was to 20K baht per month. This came about in an unusual way. I arranged for us to take a trip to Australia and she made her own case for a visa. She said that a friend told her that if she had 50K baht in her bank account, she would get the visa easily, so I upped her salary from March till February of the following year when we went to Australia. The idea was that she could return it to me after we returned. I did not seriously expect this to happen, as I figured we were pretty much man and wife and sharing everything. I was paying all expenses still and the 20K baht was going straight into her bank account. Not too bad in a country where the salaries are around 6-8K baht per month, but chicken feed compared to some of the money being thrown around recently (read some of Stickman’s articles).


The big change in our relationship occurred after I returned from spending February a year ago alone in Australia. I got hi-speed Internet installed in my apartment and you can guess the rest. Kat, instead of having no Thai boyfriends and only one farang boyfriend who was always at work, suddenly found a whole smorgasbord of “attractive” , seemingly “rich” men from all over the world interested in her. She was learning fast.


At first I wasn’t concerned. She told me that she was talking to people just for fun. They were nearly all men, but she said they were more fun. She used to take down my tie rack (it was in front of the webcam) so the guys wouldn’t ask the obvious question. She said that if the men knew about me, they wouldn’t talk to her. They all wanted to talk to single, available women. I had been “conditioned” to trust her over the 1st year of the relationship. I was often suspicious then, because I had heard so many bad stories about these Thai girls, but she proved me wrong every time. However, it is a characteristic of these Thai girls that they can wait an awfully long time before they strike, often when you least expect it and are at your most vulnerable. (Read the books I’ve listed!)


I never thought about why she never used the microphone. I asked her once, but she pretended she didn’t know how to use it. Even after I showed her she didn’t use it. As I said, I had been “conditioned”. I believed in her, I trusted her and can honestly say I loved her at that time. I was in it for the long haul. Sooner or later I would have married her and done whatever else she wanted, (kids, house, whatever), but by that time she was already casting her eyes over the Internet (I didn’t know this at the time). Many times I said to her that if she wanted out of the relationship, she just had to ask me and give me time to prepare, but she never did. She would tell me she loved me and I put that idea to rest. In hindsight, she was just using my house, hospitality, money and Internet to improve her English and look for (a) bigger fish.


THIS IS THE THING THAT HURT ME MOST AND I STILL CAN’T ACCEPT. Why tell lies, cheat and deceive and cause so much heartache, when you can be honest, discuss and work things out, and part gracefully if that is the solution. She knew she wanted out months, maybe a year before she finally went, but she still told me she loved me and pretended there was nobody else. She could have used my Internet, I could still have helped her English, and so on, but not allow myself to get so deeply involved with her. (AGAIN, THIS IS THE BAR GIRL WAY, ISN'T IT?)


You would say that I should get the “Dickhead of the Decade” prize for believing her bullshit, but a year of constantly “proving herself”, my statement about breaking up if either wanted out, and just basic trust and honesty would have ensured that she would have told me that she wanted out. The breakup would have been a lot less painful and distressing.


It was not to be. Looking back on it, it was incredible. She was chatting online just two feet away from where I was on the bed either sleeping or watching TV. She could have turned the webcam a few degrees and there I would have been for all to see. I thought she was just getting bored, so I let her go ahead. I thought it was all “sanuk”. Sometimes she would chat to 3am or later. Of course 3am is maybe 9pm in Europe which is mostly where she was looking. She would turn the webcam off when I wanted to cross to go to the toilet. I am thinking now of how callous she had actually become by this stage. I must have seemed like a complete idiot to her.


After spending some weeks/months chatting with people from all over the globe, she settled on a guy from Norway as her target. She was still chatting with several others, but some of them were “out” because they were Bangladeshis, students, and other probably penniless hopefuls. She also eventually rejected other “rich” but “too hard” targets from Italy and Turkey among other places. They looked too clever, street-wise or handsome for her to handle. I was her 1st “farang encounter” and she’s still learning the game, so she settled on a “softer” target, a guy with 2 kids. He seemed like an easier target than some of those single, handsome guys out for a bit of fun. Also, her English and confidence still isn’t good enough to take on the harder targets. The funny thing is that she’s telling me all about this, giving me a running commentary on why she’s choosing this guy over that guy and the penny never dropped. She was SERIOUS. (DUMB and DUMBER!). I had been “conditioned” well.


Moving forward in the relationship, she seemed to be spending more and more time on the Internet, and I seemed to spend more and more time working, a recipe for trouble. I tried to brighten things up by inviting her to come to Australia with me for a month. We went in February. I did not know at this stage that she had already made plans in advance to “disappear” with her chosen Internet boyfriend after we came back. The lies, cheating and deception were at an advanced stage. She was still telling me she loved me, still doing things you would expect couples to do, but the tell tale signs were there and I should have seen them, e.g., going outside the room to answer phone calls, staying away from home for a few days in a row (not just one person involved), and so on.


Finally, I found out from one of her friends what was going on. I used a Thai friend to talk to this person to get the information I suspected. She was indeed cheating on me. She was using MY Internet in my house to start up relationships with a number of guys, eventually settling on her “soft” target, the Norwegian guy with the 2 kids. Her plans were well advanced to go off with him to Norway, long before we went to Australia. I felt totally betrayed. I think I still didn’t believe it. I wanted Kat to tell me herself.


I did not reveal all I had been told, because I wanted her to tell me herself, but she wouldn’t. Any pressure from me resulted in her “clamming up” and sometimes getting a bit emotional. I tried repeatedly to get her to tell me the truth without success. I started hinting that somebody had told me. Her reaction to this was that one of her friends had betrayed her and she would leave their apartment and go back to Isaan. She was quite emotional about her OWN feelings on this. There was not a hint of compassion for me, the guy she had been cheating and lying to for months. She had become quite callous and indifferent toward me. She seemed to find it easier and easier to lie to me about boyfriends or anything else she was doing that she didn’t want me to know about.


She finally left in mid March and went back to her flatmates, still without explaining anything, but saying we needed some time apart and that she would contact me every day. She kept a small amount of contact with me, but promises of keeping in touch, if only for friendship, gradually got forgotten (not by me). I would have liked to have parted amicably and remain friends forever, but that is not the Thai bargirl way. They obliterate you from their lives, including your photos, as I have detailed later in this submission.


The next shock came when I went to Nana Plaza one night and ran into her and the Norwegian. I was stunned when I saw them together. My Thai friend had told me he was a Norwegian and even told me his name, but it wasn’t till I actually saw him I realised it was him – the Internet target. I asked him if he knew who I was and he said he didn’t. I gave him my name. He said he didn’t know me. She obviously had been lying to him also. You would think that having been found out like this, she would have had some remorse or apology. Instead I got an angry SMS telling me not to talk to her when she was with another man. She did not want anyone to know we had ever met or had a relationship. I don’t know what she told him. Obviously she didn’t tell me about him because he would have seen what sort of person she really was.


She had told me that very morning that she was visiting her family for Songkran. I assumed this meant she was going to Isaan. She had been talking about doing that quite a bit at the time. Actually, they were visiting HER in Bangkok to arrange a wedding with this guy, as I found out later, again, not from Kat herself. This shows how cunning these girls can be with English, even if their vocabulary isn’t too large. They will always excuse themselves with “My English not so good”, but they usually know exactly what they are saying. She had been still denying up to that time that she even had a boyfriend.


THEY HIDE WHAT THEY ARE AND THEY HIDE WHAT THEY DO!


That quote comes from one of the books I mentioned at the start of this story. The previous paragraph is an example of this, but here’s another one. Recently I have been going through my computer and I find certain photos have been deleted. Can you guess which ones? Of course, the ones that show us together in obviously romantic situations. Fortunately, I have backup copies of nearly all of them (for judgment day). She also deleted Messenger with any incriminating dialogues at the same time. I think she’s now almost on par with me in computer savvy! <Undeleting stuff really is not that difficultStick>


Actually the above incident seems to be related to another of her tricks/lies. Around the end of our relationship, when she was no longer living at my place, but still had a key, I came home one day and found a few things “out of place”. For example the TV had been turned off at the set. I always turn it off with the remote. About half my remaining computer paper had disappeared and there were a couple of photo prints disappeared from above the computer. She suggested maybe the owner had come in and used the TV (laughable). I don’t think burglars took the paper or the photos either. What was happening was that she was ringing me up, asking me what time I was working every day, then coming round and removing stuff while I was at work. I don’t mean stealing, she’s no “kamooy”. I could leave my wallet open on the table and she wouldn’t take a single baht. Just removing stuff from the computer, removing photos and other such “joint-owned” things. She was obviously using the computer also for contacting some of these people she was talking to on the Net. I can only guess what she was printing out, but I have a good idea.


I’m not sure how much money she’s made out of this so far, but one time when she seemed to be spending quite a bit, she showed me one of her bank books, because I said I wanted to see if she had been spending the money I had been giving her. Amazingly, she hadn’t spent any of the money I had given her. In fact, there was another deposit of, maybe 40K baht. She said it was her money, a loan payback or something. I don’t know what money she had been using to support herself if she hadn’t been spending mine. She had 2 bank accounts I knew of and now there should be a dowry (see later in article) and any income she has been receiving from other sources. She’s on her way to being one of those “independently wealthy” women who can decide what they want to do with their lives. As the husband/boyfriend gives her money/salary to accumulate, she can get to the point where she can ask herself if she wants to stay with him or not. She can split or look for a new husband/boyfriend on the Net, if she isn’t already doing so. The faster she gets the money, the quicker she gets to this stage. She is ambitious and will always be looking for something better.


Kat’s values seem to be well expressed by the book “Money Still Number One” on P.77 puts these in a list from 1 to 13. 1 is money, 2 is gold, 3 is food, 4 is sleeping, 5 is child/children, 6 is grandparents, mother, father, and so on. The last number on the list,13, is farang boyfriend. I think he makes the list only because he can provide some of the above. I think this is something farangs don’t really grasp. They think money and gifts are something extra, to show their love, but to the Thai bar girl, the real relationship is between her and his assets and money, not between her and him. Kat wrote and spoke to me many times expressing these sentiments, without understanding what she was really telling me. Looking back, it may seem funny that she didn’t try to hide it, but that is the world they live in. To them, it’s the natural order of things. Farangs should get this through their thick skulls!


In two years, Kat went from totally honest to total liar, from totally caring to totally callous, but I still think I got off lightly. A friend I know lives with a Thai girlfriend who has a Japanese boyfriend (when he’s not in town, of course!) He’s married with kids, too. “Japan man” as she calls him has a “good heart”. She’s just gone to Hong Kong to meet him and ask him for a new car. As soon as she’s got it, she plans to disappear from sight. There really is BIG money being thrown around in this country by BIG idiots.


I almost forgot the last part of this story. She married the guy while he was here, so now I guess she’s his problem. I can’t understand how someone could marry one of these girls when the relationship has mainly taken place over the Net, and over just a few months. I guess it’s just that us farang guys let ourselves get infatuated with these girls and let reason and common sense go out the door. We see a gorgeous face, we listen to their words and we believe we’ve found the love of our life.


How will her new relationship develop? Someone with kids to support can’t have unlimited funds to pay for “salaries” and “gold”. When Kat says she wants to be happy she means “rich”, and rich means rich now, not some vague promise of a pension or inheritance in the distant future. Like most Thai women, she would like to have her own kids. This is maybe the one thing that will change her. Unfortunately they also cost a lot of money. Kat also gets bored very easily (don’t they all?). She will seriously miss Thailand and her “friends”. Then there’s the cold up there. It’s a world apart from Thailand and requires a lot of adjustment. An ambitious lady like Kat may well decide it’s not for her. If (When?) that happens, I guess the whole thing starts over again, but by then her bank account will be bigger and of course, she’ll keep the dowry. She can rest comfortably knowing she can return to Thailand at some convenient time in the future. (As in my case, with minimal or no warning to the unfortunate husband/boyfriend).


Unfortunately, these girls can wait a long time to make their move. (Take my own case, for example). It’s the reverse of the farang situation. The longer we stay with someone, the longer we trust them. With these girls, the longer you stay with them, the less you should trust them. They accumulate money to the point they don’t need you.


The sad thing is that I would still have paid Kat’s “salary”, taken her to Australia and done everything else with her, regardless of the fact that she wanted out. She was a good companion when she was honest. But these girls seem to be able to turn off and on their affection like a tap. Money, gold, material things totally corrupt them.


I know my story has been repeated, with variations, over and over again. It seems that this year has become worse than ever. There’s so much money being thrown at these girls by so many gullible people these days that the whole country (Isaan at least) should be off limits to farangs. My advice? DON'T DO IT!

Stickman's thoughts:

I'm really surprised you allowed her to chat with other farang guys online for such a length of time. While you cannot tell someone what to do, you can tell them to stop things when they obviously become a bit too friendly.


nana plaza