Internet Dating and the Unbeliever
I have been a regular visitor to LOS for the past four years or so, dropping in 3 to 4 times a year. My first visit was in 1989 and a 20 year hiatus followed before resuming my love affair with Thailand in 2009.
Like most other men that come here solo, I was looking for sex and beer, not necessarily in that order. I had also told a few of the lads that I worked with about the great time to be had in BKK and highly recommended it as a spot for a bit
of well-deserved RnR.
One of the lads I had encouraged to head to LOS for his break was an American who, having decided to go, joined a Thai dating site to get himself a few dates prior to his arrival. I told him that there was no need to go to all that trouble
as it was freely available in the entertainment areas and it was a better proposition as we had no intention of looking for anything serious. I told him that I reckoned that most of the girls on there would just be bargirls in disguise and that
he’d be better off just waiting until he got there and pick in on the night. I also felt that he was being a bit unfair to the very few “good” Thai girls that may be in the site by just using them for a holiday romance, but
he insisted that “there’s no way I’m paying for it, dude, never paid for it before, ain’t going to start paying for it now!”
Over the dinner table a few nights, he was extolling the virtues of this particular site, saying that there was a plethora of fantastic girls just falling over themselves to be with him on his holidays (in fairness, he’s mid-thirties,
fit as a butcher’s dog and good looking to boot). Another one of our team, also an American, started to browse the site himself with a view to picking up a bit of free totty on a trip to LOS.
Curiosity eventually led me to have a look at the site, so I set up a basic profile and did a search, looking for women in BKK from the age of 35 to my own age of 47, as I’ve never been comfortable with dating very young women even
in Thailand. I spent a few pleasant hours of looking through the profiles of the women that had shown up on the results of the search, and had to admit that these ladies seemed very different to the ladies whom I usually befriended in the beer
bars of Bangkok. Not that there was anything wrong with the BB girls, I’ve had some great times and some fantastic nights in their company.
A facility on the site allows members to see who has viewed their profiles and it wasn’t long before I had a few “hits” from ladies whose page I’d looked at. Now, I’m no oil painting in the looks department,
so needless to say, I was impressed! Out came the credit card, and a full membership of the site was purchased to allow me to further my “research” on the subject of Thai dating sites.
Having already been a regular visitor to LOS, I was able to quickly spot the bargirls in disguise, of which to be fair, on this site anyway, there was very few, and also to weed out the ones that were using an internet translator to communicate.
Not rocket science by any means, the giveaway is when you read sentences like; “looking for loving and sincerely man, lies not wanting to be for making me happy” is a fair indication that the author isn’t going to be able
to put English as a second language on a CV any time soon.
The main reason I was doing this, is because I decided to see if there really was a woman in Thailand whom I might actually consider having a long term relationship with. Now let me be clear, I had no intention whatsoever of getting into
said relationship, as I’d recently just crawled out of a western divorce with only my dignity, and not much else, to my name. I was in classic bitter mode and had no want, need or inclination to get involved with a woman, any woman, ever
again.
This was just an academic exercise to pass a little time in the evenings, in a place where there was precious little to do in the line of entertainment, so I decided to be fussy; very, very fussy about who I would or wouldn’t chat
to. The slightest little glitch, the merest hint of a complication and they would be scratched off my list of potential candidates for the position of “Theoretical Love of My Life”. I was also honest in the blurb on my own profile
page, saying that I was single, very single, and had no intention of changing that status. I wrote that I only wanted to meet someone for dinner and drinks, maybe a show or the movies, with no other promises than that I would treat them with respect
and that we would have a good night out. I still kept getting hits!
Chatting to some of the women who did “hit me up” it became obvious that some of them hadn’t read my profile at all or if they had, then the internet translator hadn’t quite gotten my message across. I continued
to be honest with them, telling them in short lived chat sessions that I was not looking for a serious relationship and maybe they’d be better off continuing their search for the perfect farang to marry, as I most certainly wasn’t
the man they were looking for. To their credit, most of them admitted to not reading the profile or misunderstanding the translator results and very politely thanked me for being truthful with them and wished my luck in my search.
Well, to cut a long story short; I did start chatting to a nice lady, 36 years old, divorced with 2 sons who were living with her but still had a lot of contact with their father, something that’s a bit unusual with Thai divorces,
as most of us know. She worked for a large company on the outskirts of the city, a good job in a middle management position. I told her my life story and she told me hers and it turned out that we both wanted the same thing, a little company,
nice conversation, dinner in a nice restaurant, take in a show or a movie etc. etc. with no big commitments or dramas. The bargirl scene was wearing a little thin for me at that time, and I figured that a nice civilized night out in the company
of a “normal” woman would make a pleasant change, so we arranged to meet on my next RnR trip.
That was over a year ago, and we are still seeing each other exclusively, to this day. It suits us both, we have lives to live, commitments to attend to and reality to contend with, but every couple of months we spend a marvelous week together
where the rest of the world just disappears and it’s just the two of us together, no promises, no commitments, no pressure, we just enjoy immensely being with each other.
So maybe it is true what they say; that you can find any kind of woman you want in Thailand. Maybe it’s just as simple as knowing what you want, being truthful about it, and having a little patience. I don’t know, but hey, it
worked for me.
And my two American buddies?
Well, one is getting married in December to a beautiful cardiac surgery scrub nurse from the north, and the other is engaged to gorgeous mid-thirties businesswoman from BKK.
When all six of us meet as we regularly do, and we three men sit and have a beer while the ladies are off shopping and nattering together, they take the greatest of pleasure in reminding me of what a bad idea I originally thought this internet
dating was!
Stickman's thoughts:
Great stuff, stories with a nice ending make a pleasant change!
