Sick Of Hearing Nothing But Doom And Gloom

I have read Stickman for several years and am feed up of hearing nothing but doom and gloom about Thai bar girls and how they are all out to rip people off. I met my wife 15 years ago when she was working in a bar and at first it was nothing but a one
night stand to me and I thought no more about it. However, I found myself going back to the bar to see her again and finally having been with her a few times on a short-term basis I took her overnight and we had a chance to talk. She was 18
and came from a poor family where her father had died when she was 11 years old and was working to support her family. I know that this is an old story but having lived in Thailand for many years I was able to recognize the truth when I was
being told it. Her greatest desire was to get out of the bar business and to get an education so that she could earn money in a more legitimate profession and have some sort of future for herself and her family.

Having decided that it was worth the effort, I took her out of the bar and set her up in a small one-room condominium and purchased the basic things that she would need to live such as bedding, clothes and cooker as well as a television.
I then enrolled her in a language school so that she could improve her English and to my great pleasure she set about going to school every day and even doing additional night classes to improve her English so that she could eventually complete
her education. During this time I was not as naive as some of your other writers and knew it was my responsibility if I wanted to make this relationship work to support her family and I had no reservations having met the family and not only
gave them a monthly allowance but sponsored her brother and sister through their education which eventually led to them both getting degrees from a very highly respected English-speaking Bangkok university. My girlfriend, now my wife, continues
to work hard on her education and got to the point where she was able to take the entrance exam for one of Bangkok’s top universities. She took a degree in business administration and ended up with any honors degree and I have to say
that it was one of the proudest moments of my life to see her go up to get her degree having known where she started in life and what she had to do to get there.

Since getting her first degree she has taken two further degrees in English universities in marketing and computer science and now works for an international I.T. company in the UK where she is a programmer and general go to girl in the
programming department. Since starting to earn reasonable money she has assumed the responsibility for supporting her entire family and has recently purchased them a house in a nice part of Bangkok. We have been together now for 15 years and
during that time she has never once failed me or looked at any other man.

I think the secret to success has been the acceptance on both our parts that we knew where we met and how we met and never once have I flown back into her face where we met. During the first two years it was difficult as we had to build
up a level of trust that normal couples may not have to. The way that we did this was to clinically discuss all the bad things that happened to her while she was working and to get them out so that she could cleanse herself of these bad memories.
It was really difficult to hear some of the things that she had been through but I knew to make it work the best thing you can do when dealing with trauma is to talk it through and get it all out, so we went through this process two or three
times which was painful for both of us. We are now able to put it behind us and privately we can still joke about how we met and the first few times we went together.

I think to make a relationship like this work you need to respect each other and put the past behind you and work together as a partnership, never forgetting that both of you have some baggage and even though she was a working girl I
was a paying customer so both of us in one way or another had a past that was best put behind us.

I could not have wished for a better partner or a happier time and if the next 15 years are half as good as the last 15 years I'm sure that I will die a happy and contented old man.

For all of you out there that fill your head with negative thoughts about Thai girls, all I can say is that you get out of a relationship what you put into it and if you're both willing to put the past behind you, you can have a
future better than any you could imagine.

Yours sincerely

A happy old man.