Sequel to Help Needed Understanding A Thai Girlfriend
I am writing, at last, to replace the question mark which terminated my last submission, with something closer to a full-stop, having now arrived at a better understanding of the girlfriend experience I recently had in Thailand.
I would like to thank the many readers who emailed me after my first submission, most of whom gave me kind support, sensible advice and in some cases shared personal experiences of a very similar nature to my own — I'm only sorry that
I did not have the time to reply to everyone but hopefully this updated submission will provide an acceptable substitute.
One less than helpful email pointed out that I could have got much more sex for much less money in Pattaya but that is rather obvious and missing the point completely. Like many other Farangs who find themselves in similar situations, I was
not looking simply for sex but for a relationship, even love, which is a much bigger concept than sex alone and probably beyond the perspective of most leg-wrestling Farangs in Pattaya.
If the promise contained in the pleadings of countless personal ads are to be believed, then love is also what the great majority of Thai woman say they are looking for but then, to be fair, the definition of love has kept poets scribbling
for many years; perhaps one has to accept that, in the same way our languages differ, our concept of love probably does too.
There does seem to be a depressingly repetitive thread through so many of the stories here and elsewhere that I don't really know why I ever thought it could be different for me. For Farangs, love is easily confused with sex and for
Thai women, love is even more easily confused with money. Hence the thriving sex-for-money industry. Throw in the Thais' preference for white skin, plus the association of age with wealth and perhaps a certain optimism that the fat, old,
white-skinned Farang will die of a heart attack after some frenetic sex or simply die of natural causes within a few short years then it's no wonder there are so many of them wanting to marry so many of us.
The ego in me wanted to believe that my relationship with "Fon" (actually her real name is XXXXX <Edited by me – Stick>) was based, at least once we had got to know each other, on her reciprocating
my love for her rather than a protracted confidence trick (which is how seems to have started out). But as James Riley once observed, "If a bird walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is very probably a duck".
Though I may have escaped with my sanity and bank balance largely intact, the phone calls and text messages from Fon continued unabated for several weeks (sometimes more than 50 a day) probably in the hope that I would have a change of heart,
lose my willpower or crave the sex in which she was so expert. Then one day the calls suddenly stopped.
After two weeks without a single call, message or email, my relief was tempered by an overwhelming desire to phone her; which I did only to find that this time it was she who didn't answer the calls, though to be fair I was blocking
my caller ID.
Eventually she did answer but she couldn't recognize my voice at all, even though for weeks we had been speaking on the phone for at least a couple of hours a day. I reminded her that we were once in Chiang Mai together but she said
she went there at least twice a year. I told her that we had the most amazing sex and she laughed. I told her I bought her some jewellery in Chinatown but still the light didn't dawn.
So, ok, I was being a little vague but for God's sake it is only 2 weeks ago she was leaving me messages of undying love. I reminded her we were due to get married but she said "No, I not marry anyone". Then I gave her my name.
"What you want? Why you calling me?"
I suggested that with so many men in her life maybe it was difficult for her remember all of them or even where she had got to with each of them – clearly she had forgotten all about me. She riposted that I was in the past and that she had
moved on with her life.
I reminded her that this was not what she had told me. She said I had shamed her, made her lose face and that she could never be happy again and that 2 weeks seemed like an awfully short time to get over such a dramatic disappointment.
With that she told me that she didn't have to listen to my bullshit any longer and she hung up.
In many ways I am relieved now that I know the truth. How much worse it would have been if all the doomsayers had been wrong and she had turned out to have been the wonderful girl I first imagined, whom I had dumped simply because I lacked
the necessary trust. Now I know that she was just another good-looking Thai girl exploiting her sex and her not inconsiderable guile and I was just another passing opportunity on whom she focused her attention and energy for a very short term.
It's a real shame that so many Thai girls are made this way. Because of sites like Stickman dedicating more and more space to sharing this kind of intelligence it is going to result in Farangs viewing these girls with more and more suspicion.
The girls have but a simple choice; either they resist the urge to keep making a quick buck thereby scaring off their "opportunities" or they take a longer view, investing more time in developing an enduring relationship.
I suspect though, like Riley's duck, they will just carry on quacking and we will just carry on f—ing.
Stickman's thoughts:
Part of your story really reminds me of when I used to do the online thing. You'd meet a woman once and then don't have a chance to see her for a week as you're busy. When you call her a week later, she genuinely doesn't know who you were, an indicator of how many guys she's in contact with and / or has been meeting!