Burning Questions

Two phone calls from old friends. Two burning questions. Marriage to Thai women.

That, in a few words, is a summary of what is bothering not just my friends, but also many of you. Do I have any answers? Probably not, but consider these stories and decide for yourself.

The first call was from a good friend who has been living with his Thai girlfriend for three years. During that time, he has been happy. Apparently, she has not.

Recently, she started making noises about getting married. My friend wasn’t too enthusiastic, but as they had been together for so long he figured it wouldn’t hurt. So he agreed.

That was when she hit him with the zinger: How much dowry he would pay her parents?

He balked.

She cried. They argued. She sulked.

She pointed out that he had an obligation to pay a dowry because of ‘Thai Tradition’.

He pointed out that where he comes from the parents usually give the marrying couple money. Anyway, he wasn’t comfortable with paying a dowry, and he wouldn’t do it.

More crying, arguing, and sulking.

Finally, realizing that he wouldn’t budge on this issue she gave in and said she wouldn’t insist any more.

But the damage was done. When he called me up, he asked what I thought he should do. I asked him if he would feel comfortable paying a dowry. He said no. So, there is your answer, I replied.

Then, as we talked some more, it became clear that things were far more serious than I thought at first. He ended up saying that he was on the verge of kicking her out of his life completely. As he explained, even though she had given in, he felt she had not accepted his decision. She would use it against him in the future. My friend obviously has a very clear insight into how women think.

It also emerged that she had brought up the question of having kids. He has told her several times during the three years they have lived together that he has already had the cut and he can’t have any more kids. Besides, he pointed out, he already had a few fully-grown kids back home, and at his age he didn’t want to become a father again.

Being Thai, she ignored this and continued talking about wanting babies with him. He asked me what he should do.

I responded that I make beautiful kids (I have the proof running around my home), and I would be happy to provid the kid making service if required. After politely declining, he went on to ask the burning question, “Why couldn’t she understand that he could never have kids again?”

Wrong question.

Thai women do not think or listen logically. She is yearning to have kids. She is living with a man. Therefore, he must give her kids. And to do that they have to get married. Which means he must pay her parents a Sin Sot.

Thai logic is so beautiful. It would be wonderful if it made any sense. But as she has made these decisions in her own mind, she is not willing to entertain any other alternatives. She forgets the obvious. She is from a small Esarn farming community. Her family live in a small wooden house. Before she met my friend she had nothing, and no support for her child from her previous Thai marriage.

Here in Bangkok, she lives in a beautiful condo with air-conditioning, a fridge full of food, TV all the time, more money than her parents have ever made in their whole lives. She has a man who, until now, has loved and cared for her far better than she could resonably expect from any esarn farmer’s son.

But she is willing to throw it all away because she insists on a so-called tradition that her man does not, and cannot, feel comfortable about. I suspect things have gone too far for this relationship to continue. She said some harsh things during their discussions about the Sin Sod.

He realizes that the only way to ensure a complete break is to be drastic. He will tell the condo guards to hand her the suitcase he has packed with her things one day when she returns from work. They will not allow her entry to the building again.

He will probably move, for good measure. And he will change his mobile phone number as well. I hope he remembers to call me from the new number. I’d like to hear how he is getting on. I bet he’s going to have a ball!

MARRY IN HASTE….

The old saying that you marry in haste and repent at leisure has been brought home to another friend of mine with a vengeance. It all started one night a few years ago. We’d been out drinking. We were sitting up on the balcony of the condo I had sold him not long before. He told me that the new girlfriend he had met a couple of months ago was pregnant. He was going to get married.

That seemed a little fast, but accidents do happen. I congratulated him.

I had met her. She worked in a travel agency, spoke good English, and seemed nice enough. So, I invited them out for lunch with my family.

During the lunch my wife got to know the girl, who let it slip that she had deliberately got pregnant so that she could snare my friend. He had money, she said, and she needed a man like him to take care of her. We were soon to find out why she needed the money.

When my wife told me this after we arrived home I was a little worried. But what could I do? If I told my friend this it could damage our friendship. Besides, he was old enough to make his own decisions.

He did come to me a little later, before they got married, and asked whether I thought he was doing the right thing. I agonized over whether to tell him what had transpired at the lunch. In the end I realized that if I were in his position I would want my friends to tell me if they thought I was making a mistake. I told him as gently as I could that he should wait and be very sure that she was marrying him for love. I found out later that he had asked several of his friends the same question. They all told him the same as I did.

I should have known better. He wasn’t looking for advice. He was asking me to confirm that he had made the right decidion. Of course, he ignored me and married her.

The first signs of trouble came not long afterwards when I asked how the pregnancy was going. It turned out she wasn’t pregnant. She had told him that to hurry him into getting married. At that stage, he should have bailed out immediately. He already knew she was lying to him. But he was still ‘in love’ with her. He stayed.

Then he called me again. He was at his wits end. His new bride had just revealed she had two kids with her Thai husband. She had brought them over to live with him. He’d already been divorced from a bad marriage in the UK. He had a couple of teenaged kids back there. He wasn’t ready to look after someone else’s kids. They fought.

In the end, she agreed to give the young nine year old son to the Thai father to look after. Then my friend found out that the father was the odd job man who had been coming to his condo.

By now, the alarm bells were ringing so clearly even he could hear them. The problem was, he had formed an attachment with her daughter. He couldn’t just turf his wife out and get on with his life.

The clincher came about three years ago when his wife announced that she really was pregnant. They had a baby daughter.

Meanwhile, he had no job, no steady income, and his savings were rapidly running out. He’d spent a lot buying the condo and redecorating it. He needed to do something to generate an income. A restaurant in the same compound as his condo sounded like a good idea.

He rented a townhouse and spent the next six months overseeing a complete refit to turn the ground floor into a restaurant. They started serving meals up for the condo tenants, many of them westerners. The business did not do as well as he hoped. The bills were piling up. So, they moved out of his condo into the shophouse. He rented out his condo, which at least kept the wolf from the door.

Customers reported that they had screaming fights in the restaurant in front of everyone. Despite this, the business grew. Sometimes, all the tables would fill up for lunch and dinner. But the income was barely enough to cover the expenses, leaving them with very little to save.

When you try to build a relationship on a tissue of lies and deception, the result is a foregone conclusion. Finally, my friend had had enough. He called me up recently and asked me to reduce the price on his condo for sale. He wants to get the money, leave his wife, sell his restaurant, and go back to India where he has another condo. He has had enough of being married to a lying, scheming, screaming shrew. She’s certainly not the woman he thought he was getting.

I have often had friends ask me whether Thai women are any worse than women elsewhere in the world.

I don’t think that is the right question. The real question is, how well can you make decisions that will affect the rest of your life when you are ‘in love’ with a woman?

Hindsight is easy. But if you are thinking about getting married, you want to think very carefully and ensure you get the right answers to your burning questions.

© Marc Holt. All rights reserved by the author.