Thai Woman – Farang Woman, Same-Same?

I’m sure it’s not just me but I’ve always found that living with any woman has its difficulties. I’m not talking about life’s big problems but the little day-to-day things that just wind you up a little. Compromises
have to be made when you live with a woman and I usually find that it’s me that has to make them.

This is bad enough in Farangland but when your wife is Thai you better not be the sort to get easily upset by the ‘little things’ or your partnership won’t last five minutes. I love my wife dearly but I do get stressed
out by some of the ‘little things’ she does.

My wife does a pile of laundry EVERYDAY. Even as I write, I can see her in the garden hanging clothes out to dry. There are only the two us. Where the hell does all this washing come from every single day? I think she probably wears my clothes
and rolls around in them in the garden when I’m at work. There’s no other explanation.

We have three televisions in our house. One is downstairs in the lounge and we have a couple in the bedrooms. We only get the satellite channels on the downstairs TV. The idea is that when the wife wants to watch one of her lame, Thai soaps
while the football is on she has the option to go upstairs and do so. However, she refuses. She sits and sulks until I usually relent and let her watch her soap on the downstairs TV. I am having satellite TV installed in one of the bedrooms so
that I can watch the football upstairs. I don’t understand.

Like all Thai people, my wife walks slowly and when we are out, she will always walk a couple of paces behind me. I have to be careful when we are out together because if I don’t keep half an eye looking behind me I might stride off
into the distance. If I accidentally increase the distance between us, her reaction is not to speed up as you might expect, but to slow down. If I slow down to wait for her, she will slow down too. If I stop altogether, she will stop and innocently
wonder what we have stopped for.

Men are not supposed to know anything about ladies’ handbags, poofs and katoeys excepted. My wife constantly asks my opinion about this handbag or that handbag and whether or not it would match this dress or that dress. Sweet,
suffering Jesus, do I look queer to you?

Whenever my wife and I enter a restaurant I have a little snigger, especially if the place is not very busy. My wife will look at a large room full of empty tables and will pick her way through half a dozen identical ones before choosing
one she likes. The waiter will then pull a chair out for her and my wife will ignore it, walk around the table, pull out her own chair and sit down. Is she expecting that the waiter is going to join us for dinner?

I have never liked having locked doors at home. When I was a kid, my father used to say, “There are no secrets in this house. We don’t need locked doors.” Well, OK but we live in a different place and time and in my house,
it is necessary to lock the storeroom and washroom which are only accessible from outside. Inside, we have a rack fixed to the wall where all our keys hang. If my wife is out and I need to get something from the storeroom, I can guarantee that
the storeroom key will not be hanging on the rack. There is no point trying to locate it. It has been put in a ‘safe place’. No good phoning her to ask for its whereabouts, she will not say. Either because she can’t remember
or she is afraid someone will overhear and she will then have to find a new ‘secret place’. I will have to wait until my wife comes home before I can gain entry to the storeroom.

Similarly, the door to one of the bedrooms is always locked. I have no idea where the key to this door is. In this room, apart from the usual bedroom furniture, we keep the safe. There is nothing of any real value in the safe aside from a
few semi-important documents. My wife used to keep a pair of diamond earrings in this safe but she took them out a few weeks ago to wear to a special function. Rather than keep them in some kind of jewelry box, she had them wrapped in a tissue.
A few hours after taking them out of the safe, she had lost them. She thinks she accidentally flushed them down the toilet!!

This bedroom door remains locked and when I ask my wife about it she says she worries that any burglars might carry the safe away. It weighs ninety kilos but that is not a significant detail to my wife’s way of thinking. This bedroom
is effectively ‘off limits’ to me.

What’s the thing with leaving drawers and cupboard doors open? My wife leaves wardrobe doors and cutlery drawers open. I close them. It’s a never-ending battle. She claims that the inside of cupboards and drawers smell if you
keep them closed. Anybody ever notice that?

Union Hill

Stickman's thoughts:

Forever the cynic that I am, some of these things sounds remarkably like power and control games, though some of them just sound just like women… I will say one thing though. I NEVER had any of these sorts of experiences with girlfriends back in my native New Zealand. I'll give them one thing, most Kiwi girls are BS free – very, very few play these sorts of games, or at least that is how it was when I used to live there.