I met my wife (Ong) through a free dating site (Badoo) in late September 2009, 8 months after leaving the soon to be ex-wife, and was determined that my previous experience with a Thai lady was not going to be repeated, or at least try as hard as possible to make sure it didn't happen again (you can not really know for certain most of the time).
Ong was online at 1am (Thai time) which I found quite unusual as most of them are asleep much earlier, so I made contact with her and it turned out she was doing a night shift at an Udon Thani hotel (Ruysuk). She came over being very pleasant and incredibly laid back, and far from being eager let's say. In a way that was perhaps a better sign than being begged to fly out in the next week to visit them!
We used Badoo and MSN Messenger for a few weeks to chat away the hours, but I was already itching to get back out to the land of smiles, so I asked her if I could come and see her in December that year. She accepted and arranged to take a month off work to spend time with me.
So along came 14th December, and I was like a child in a toy shop, far too excited about flying back to this amazing country. I arrived at Udon Thani airport the next day and sure enough, Ong was waiting for me (with a friend that I had seen on Badoo while talking to Ong).
Ong has a young daughter but also had the sense to leave her with relatives so that we could have some proper time together, so we booked in to a hotel (not where she worked) and "discovered" each other over the next 28 days. We went to Rayong for a week to visit one of her brothers (a musician), it is not a tourist trap so most of our time was spent eating in restaurants and listening to her brother entertain the customers.
By the time the month was up, I had seen and heard enough to believe she may well have been "the one", certainly a very good one that was not going to be gold-digging. So I proposed, a proposal that was accepted. Great! All I had to do now was to push the divorce through as quickly as possible and tell my employers I was about to vanish from the UK.
Ong was online at 1am (Thai time) which I found quite unusual as most of them are asleep much earlier, so I made contact with her and it turned out she was doing a night shift at an Udon Thani hotel (Ruysuk). She came over being very pleasant and incredibly laid back, and far from being eager let's say. In a way that was perhaps a better sign than being begged to fly out in the next week to visit them!
We used Badoo and MSN Messenger for a few weeks to chat away the hours, but I was already itching to get back out to the land of smiles, so I asked her if I could come and see her in December that year. She accepted and arranged to take a month off work to spend time with me.
So along came 14th December, and I was like a child in a toy shop, far too excited about flying back to this amazing country. I arrived at Udon Thani airport the next day and sure enough, Ong was waiting for me (with a friend that I had seen on Badoo while talking to Ong).
Ong has a young daughter but also had the sense to leave her with relatives so that we could have some proper time together, so we booked in to a hotel (not where she worked) and "discovered" each other over the next 28 days. We went to Rayong for a week to visit one of her brothers (a musician), it is not a tourist trap so most of our time was spent eating in restaurants and listening to her brother entertain the customers.
By the time the month was up, I had seen and heard enough to believe she may well have been "the one", certainly a very good one that was not going to be gold-digging. So I proposed, a proposal that was accepted. Great! All I had to do now was to push the divorce through as quickly as possible and tell my employers I was about to vanish from the UK.