You’ll see a well to do foreigner in Thailand who spent forty years building a career and making enough good decisions to finally retire comfortably. Then six months after meeting a "local" girl on his first trip to Siam, he’s taking life advice from someone whose biggest qualification is knowing how to keep him permanently off balance. How the hell does that happen? Most of these blokes aren’t stupid. Yet somehow they end up following her around like a buffalo that wandered off into the wrong rice field and now can’t find its way back out. The education gap alone should make the whole thing impossible. One person has decades of life experience and a career behind him. The other often barely scraped through primary school, if even any schooling at all. Yet somehow she’s the strategic mastermind of the pair now and he’s standing there with his ATM card in hand, waiting for instructions. I can’t make the maths work. Maybe it’s because he’s convinced himself he’s just pulled off the greatest caper in history. A woman half his age who wouldn’t have looked twice at him twenty years earlier, or ever for that matter. Once he buys into that fantasy, everything else comes with it. The drama. The sulking. The emotional blackmail. The endless little loyalty tests. Some of these women seem professionally offended. Every day there’s a fresh crisis. Every conversation starts with a sigh and ends with him apologising for something he didn’t even know he’d done. I’d last about six seconds around one of these birds. Then I look at these couples and think, what exactly are these guys seeing? Half the women of this ilk are covered in tattoos, appear permanently angry, and loud enough that I’d be asking the airline for a different seat if one of them sat next to me. Meanwhile, the bloke is walking around like he won first prize in the lottery. I suppose that’s what puzzles me most. It isn’t the age gap. It isn’t even the money. It’s watching a dude who came to Thailand looking for freedom end up asking for permission to spend his own money, where he's allowed to go, what he's allowed to eat, and who he's allowed to talk with. That’s the bit I just can’t make sense of.
