Could and would you live where you live without your wife?

[OneMoreFarang]

We have often threads and questions in this forum about living in Thailand. And it seems often this is about living somewhere in the paddy fields far away from any city.

I always wonder how many of the guys who consider this though it trough.

Many of us have younger wives and according to nature it is more likely that we die before our wife. But what if she dies first? Maybe an accident or cancer or whatever? It happens.

 

How many guys who live now with their wife in a village mostly with the wife's family around them would be able to continue to live there? And how many would want to continue to live there?

 

Personally I live in the middle of Bangkok for many years with my gf. I am happy with her and I don't depend on her. If she would die in an accident I would continue to live in the same place and most of my life would continue as usual. Personally this gives me freedom of mind.

 

How about you?

Could and would you live where you live without your wife?

[steve187]

a thought that sometimes occurs to me, Thailand and my wife go hand in hand, it would not be the same without her, both retired we do a lot of things together, day trips, holidays, eating out, beach etc. would i want to be lonely in my home country or in Thailand, the answer is i don't know, but where would be the best place for me, i haven't come to a conclusion, and i hate the thought of having to make that decision, it would be tough but should the time come it would have to be made.

Edited May 6, 2022 by steve187

[grain]

No way, if we had a big row and split up, 30 minutes later I'd have my stuff packed in my car and hit the highway. Living in a little rice paddy village in NE was the last thing I wanted to do, but it slowly happened step by step. 

[Farmerslife]

This is something that concerns me. A couple of years back my wife suffered a minor stroke. Thankfully, she has fully recovered but it was a nasty moment.

I hope she outlives me, she is afterall 15 years younger than me but, that said, her health isn't great. 

Were she to die before me then I would find the isolation of the farm oppressive. Also I have to accept that age is catching up with me fast and my ability to put in the work on the farm will surely come to an end at some point in the not too distant future.  

If I end up facing this situation then I would retreat to Bangkok. It has everything to meet my needs. Immigration easily accessible,  health services both public and private, accommodation within my budget, good public transport and plenty of distractions (shows, eating out, pubs, the arts) to entertain me while I am able.

Bangkok also happens to be where a person very dear to me lives but that is a story for another day.  

Edited May 6, 2022 by Farmerslife
Typo corrected

[CharlieH]

I think many of us ended up in a place and didnt think that far ahead or just didnt think it through properly and learn the mistakes as time progresses.

 

If I had my time over again NO I wouldnt live here.

Having been here so long I could easily carry on if something happened but I wouiddnt, I would move to somewhere where I should have moved to to start with. That said hindsight is 20/20.

 

We can all only do what we feel is right for us at the time.

[JayClay]

23 minutes ago, grain said:

Living in a little rice paddy village in NE was the last thing I wanted to do, but it slowly happened step by step. 

You let it happen!

 

If you don't want to be there; move.

[BritManToo]

I'm totally OK in Chiang Mai.

I decide where I live, plenty of women everywhere, no need to go and live in her village.

[RichardColeman]

If I was not with my wife and our daughter then I'd go back to good old blighty.

 

I do not like Thailand, I only live here as I currently cannot take them back to the UK yet - money is not the issue I cannot do this currently.

 

I live in the UK along the Thames in a quiet town, green and beautiful. It is far , far a better place to live than Thailand. 

 

 

[1FinickyOne]

we have 2 homes and I could live in either place easily... including our home in a family compound in the village... 

[jerrymahoney]

Could and would you live where you live without your wife?

 

I did for almost 20 years. People say the place is boring. I like boring.

[jerrymahoney]

15 minutes ago, RichardColeman said:

If I was not with my wife and our daughter then I'd go back to good old blighty.

 

I do not like Thailand, I only live here as I currently cannot take them back to the UK yet - money is not the issue I cannot do this currently.

 

I live in the UK along the Thames in a quiet town, green and beautiful. It is far , far a better place to live than Thailand. 

Thailand. Cash & Carry.

[sammieuk1]

With cooking cleaning tea and coffee making gone so would I be????

[EVENKEEL]

51 minutes ago, JayClay said:

You let it happen!

 

If you don't want to be there; move.

Very true, me ending up in a rice paddy was my doing. From buying land to building a house, all me. I didn't think it through, I was making good money at the time. 4 months work paid for a 2M thb build. I lined up an EP school for kid elsewhere, found a rental, we packed clothes and my motorbike in my truck and left.

 

I haven't been back even for a visit for 5 years, I have a feeling I would get sick if I was to see how her family is taking care of the house. But I have no ill feelings over my mistake because fortunately I had the money to start over.

 

I have given this some thought, if poof if I was all alone again I would like to try renting a very high end condo in Pattaya area, maybe Bang Sare, you know the ones steps from beach, everything nice with great gym and sauna.

Edited May 7, 2022 by EVENKEEL

[KannikaP]

2 hours ago, OneMoreFarang said:

though it trough.

Isn't English tough for foreigners?   LOL

Edited May 7, 2022 by KannikaP

[Kenny202]

I would strongly recommend anyone coming to live in Thailand with a woman doesn't go and live in their womans home village. Too many old boyfriends, bad stories, skeletons and access to gambling etc. Having said that when I first came I went and lived in my girls village in remote Chiayaphum. Very poor area but beautiful. Mountains everywhere...waterfalls and rockpools within a 2 minute drive. People were for the most part super friendly and some real characters. Little market every afternoon. Plenty of places for motorbike rides on and off road. Built a little house there and truly loved it. Didn't take long to work out the GF wasn't very popular there. Her and her family had some very bad past stories there. Unfortunately after about a year had the rug pulled from under me as she disgraced herself in the worst possible way and we had to leave as she was embarrassed. At the time I was happy enough to do so as it was an excuse to get all of my stuff out of her house and go rent somewhere with a lease in my name and regain control of my life. Not long after the opportunity presented itself and I was able to shunt her. Still feel sad to have had to leave that beautiful place and still have many friends in the village. Would have been more than happy to live their without the woman I was with. 

 

Have since lived in a couple of other villages in other areas and was bored beyond belief...nothing going for them at all. Just hot, boring and uninteresting 

[farmerjo]

If my wife was to pass,i'm sure it would not be long before other recommendations from the village will be put forward.

So yes,i would stay.

[starky]

I spent the first 8 years with my wife full proper Isaan jungle and whilst we were building the house that included hardly any electric, bucket showers and squat toilets.

   Certainly it was nothing i would have considered nor entertained prior to meeting my wif. Now many years later we have a holiday condo, a much nicer house in town and still our old house in the jungle. Where we go most weekends time permitting.

 In life you have no comprehension of something you have never done. 

  Without hesitation even if i was not with my wife i would live in all those places without her, but without her i would never of had the opportunity to do the things i have done. They are mutually exclusive

So to answer your question yes i could but without my wife i never would have.

 

Edited May 7, 2022 by starky

[pgrahmm]

Interesting question.....

 

Of course I could live alone very well.....Everything needed is on available here (CM).....

 

But, I also have a car & RV back in the states..... I'd probably go RV through a few states for awhile & touch base with friends & family, country wide ... Then decide what, where, when, and why.....

 

Meeting people has never been a problem.....Maybe just RV around and get a Bangkeaw puppy to train.....

 

[Ralf001]

Absolutely, if there is ample clunge on tap.

[The Oracle]

WARNING!  Text Wall

I moved to a rice farm in the Bowels of Nowhere in April 2016.  I had started learning basic Thai using Google Translate prior to my move here.  My landlady -  who I had met during a holiday in 2015 where she was a tour guide for a Chinese bus tour company and her cousin was a cashier at a pub -  spoke very little English which she had learned twenty-plus years prior while in Hong Kong as a Thai-Chinese translator.  When she moved back "home" in late 2015, she contacted me asking if I wanted to rent out the top half of her house.
I thought, "why not?" I was recently divorced (that was actually finalised over the phone here in this house to the Family Court in Australia) and I was in a share house (at age 47) in Melbourne.
I came over for a week in January 2016 to have a look around.  Moved here that April.
There are no other foreigners here.  At all.  I maybe see one at the small Phetchabun Immigration Office every second 90-day report.  But I don't talk to them.
I have a few friends in Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Phuket, Nakhon Ratchasima, Kalasin, and Sakon Nakhon.   Korat is the closest, about four hours.  Pattaya and Kalasin around five hours; Chiang Mai and SN are seven-eight.  I try to get to see them each a couple of times a year and I travel extensively at other times.
But here's the difference.
I'm single.
I spend all my time outside in a sala I had built, watching television or reading.  I eat, sleep, and travel alone.  There are no restaurants, no social places like pubs, nothing. 

Having said that, I am a very social sort of bloke and I miss face-to-face interaction.  Sure, I can (and do) go down the road and have a few lao khaos with the farmers and builders after their work day every now and then but, let's be fair here:  my language level even after six years isn't up to fluency level and my background both work-wise and education-wise is completely different to my friends - while I have learned a lot about sharpening ploughshares and welding, I can't impart any of my knowledge back as they have absolutely no point of reference.  They're all 55-60 years old and the primary school has only been here since 1974 so many were taught how to read and write by their parents - even now some of them still can't do either.

After travel restrictions were lifted in July 2020, I went touring again.  Pretty bad in most places but it was my trips around mid-2021 after the April 2021 nationwide shutdown of entertainment venues that really struck it home.  Nobody.  Nothing.  You cold cross Beach or Seconbd Road in Pattaya without even looking; something suicidal in July 2019.

I was hardly inconvenienced by any restrictions.  Unless I'm going inter-provincial for English and beers, or to Immigration 80km away, I'm at home or I on my motorbike to the market for food twice a day.
Even prior to the Plague, from as early as 2010 when my wife and I brought our kids here, I had seen numbers slowly dwindle as people decided to go elsewhere to avoid being scammed by locals, or expat bar-owners in Phuket padding bills.  And it got worse,  Then service and politeness - even the Smile for which Thailand was famous - slipped.
Markedly more so since the pandemic when the only people I saw were older White guys glaring out from pubs in the delineated "farang strip" in Khon Kaen and Udon Thani, or in Phuket, or Jomtien, or wherever and they were about as welcoming a dose of chlamydia.  So I went to Thai bars.

Also since the pandemic and the resultant disintegration of many businesses, a lot of the younger generation have been returning here.  Pretty much this place didn't have anybody (especially female) aged between around 18 and 40. 
But they have brought to the village is bigotry and hatred.  When I first arrived six years ago there were a few raised eyebrows but after four weeks I was at the markets buying fruit and vegetables solo.   I was pretty much accepted after about three months - I was no longer a freak - and my regular appearances at weddings, funerals, and ordinations were now normalised although people coming from other provinces all wanted to know what I was doing here.  Until then end of 2020, it was great. 
The Covid returnees have been gone from the village for so long - longer than I've been here, at least - that they're shocked that a foreigner is in the village.  More than a few have decided to suggest to their friends and family at the market, all the while calling me all the worst names I can be called, insisting to each other and those around them that I should go back to wherever I came from.  And take my virus with me. 
I shake my head at them, look straight at the bigot and say, "I can understand you.  Your mother must love your mouth."  That shocks them even more.  The old ducks at the stalls have a great laugh.

But, after all that, moving my stuff from Australia in 2019, I'm leaving at the end of this November.  The roadblocks to staying here are getting worse.  Changes to visa requirements - I'm on an O-A - around health insurance will only get worse.   There are no grandfathering clauses which means changes to new applicants affects those who had already been accepted.  And the chance of the insurance company reneging on payment is astronomical, too, apparently.  The requirement for me to have 800,000 baht in a bank account earning 0.5% until, basically, I die here and then it jut gets taken by the government is a bit rich. The *ridiculous* hoops we jump through for basic services like a drivers licence or internet or water is farcical.  And if a government employee doesn't know something, they'll just lie about it so they don't have to do anything except get paid to sit in air-conditioned comfort, going through rainforest's worth of trees a year, and embossing everything with a rubber stamp.

As I said, I was lucky during the pandemic at its peak but the residue of virus misinformation, their disdain for their erstwhile foreign employers, and general racism that the disgruntled people brought up here and spread around during the last year in particular has made staying in this place untenable.  What made this a nice, comfortable haven - albeit, in hindsight, a little *too* isolated - devoid of scammers and schemers and backstabbers and profiteers in the larger communities has gone.

I have spent a lot of time, money, and emotion here.  My landlady's daughter, who was just finishing Grade 1 when I got here, starts Grade 8 next week, my Thai is pretty darned good but not fully-conversational as I have few occasions to use it to a high level, and I leave behind a lot of stuff not worth paying $4000 shipping back to Australia.  My landlady is a great friend and I will sorely miss her and her extended family on this massive farm.   I've considered Cambodia, near the Thai border so I can continue using a language I spent close to seven years trying to learn (alone, and I'm also partially deaf and rely on reading lips which is hard to do with face masks on everybody)  a language which is useless pretty much anywhere else in the world outside a Thai restaurant.

But what I won't miss is the insidiousness being spread by disgruntled "masseuses" and the Minister for Public Health which have begun to threaten my own security.

[The Oracle]

Second reply but very brief.
I've been here for just over six years.  I'm single.  At the end of 2020, my landlady had a stroke - fortunately she was with me in the car when it happened so I got her straight t he local hospital.
She made it clear to her extended family that I was to continue to be allowed to live in this house if she died.
And I would stay, too, to begin with at least and see what happens.  I would expect the surviving members to take the car and motorbike which I bought (but are in her name as they were bought before I turned fifty) and sell them.
I reckon I'd stay in the area, though if I could find a place - there are no rentals here in rural Phetchabun - but failing that I'd probably move to Nong Khai (if I had the car) or Chang Mai as six years here is getting a bit too isolated even with my frequent "English and Foreign Food" trips to foreigner infested cities.

 

[Kwasaki]

4 hours ago, OneMoreFarang said:

Could and would you live where you live without your wife?

Yes but don't tell anyone.

[KannikaP]

Lived 10 years in a house I paid for/ built in GFs village, 30 km from city centre. Family lives very close but never ask for anything.

If she 'went away' I would not move at my age (74) having all my comforts here, TVs, PCs, good internet, nice kitchen & oven, comfy bed, mom & pop shops nearby. I would just while away my final years in the way I am used to.

[vinci]

age gap is 2 year different, at this age we will never know who will go first, im here because of her, if she is not around i would go home back to the Stated, firstly i have the privilege's of having financial stable, i can be back in the stated and live comfortably, second i do not want to deal with immigration anymore, im so tire of them, thirdly there won't be anybody close left to hang around Thailand.

Edited May 7, 2022 by vinci

[KannikaP]

1 hour ago, vinci said:

age gap is 2 year different, at this age we will never know who will go first, im here because of her, if she is not around i would go home back to the Stated, firstly i have the privilege's of having financial stable, i can be back in the stated and live comfortably, second i do not want to deal with immigration anymore, im so tire of them, thirdly there won't be anybody close left to hang around Thailand.

Would you have to learn to type proper 'English' before you went there.   LOL

[vinci]

Quote

I would not move at my age (74)

old people getting grumpy, i understand, appreciate your advice

Edited May 7, 2022 by vinci

[Isaan sailor]

Good question.

When you build a big house in your wife’s village, you come to regard it as your retirement home.  Very comfortable in this house and the neighbors (mostly family) are quite friendly and accepting.  If I lost my wife—I would stay.  Plenty of stunners around,  although would probably spend more time at our small rented beach house.

[Kalasin Jo]

3 hours ago, KannikaP said:

Lived 10 years in a house I paid for/ built in GFs village, 30 km from city centre. Family lives very close but never ask for anything.

If she 'went away' I would not move at my age (74) having all my comforts here, TVs, PCs, good internet, nice kitchen & oven, comfy bed, mom & pop shops nearby. I would just while away my final years in the way I am used to.

At 70 I'm beginning to feel like that too!

[Kwasaki]

1 hour ago, vinci said:

old people getting grumpy, i understand, appreciate your advice

If you think 74 is old then that's sad. 

[OneMoreFarang]

3 minutes ago, Kwasaki said:

If you think 74 is old then that's sad. 

I think when I was young we called those over 60 "ancient". ????