16 Apr When I first started using Thai Love Links back in the late 00’s, it was an irrepressible phenomenon
You could literally go on the internet, chat with a girl for a short-time and ask her to spend the night together all within the space of a few minutes. While traveling around Thailand, you could easily make arrangements to meet a girl wherever you happened to be going and hook up for the night in your hotel room with very little difficulty. It was a moveable feast: one not driven by exchange of money but just delight in the opportunity. More than once, even when a friend was brought along for security, it just meant that eventually I would get to have both. Heady times indeed!
But times have now changed somewhat, and Thai women have become less trusting of foreign men on the internet. There are regular warnings in the press telling of the “dangers” of such meetings. Of course, the most likely problem to occur might be an unplanned one-night stand, but xenophobia runs deep and irrationally through the Thai psyche. That isn’t to say that there still aren’t a lot of available Thai women seeking foreign men on the internet, but the quality seems to have declined markedly since that time and there are steeper barriers of distrust to be overcome that sometimes just aren’t worth the effort. As with all good things, they must come to an end sooner or later, but this is paradise lost for some of us. The experience has become much closer to internet dating in a Western country, meaning much more sensible but also quite a bit less enjoyable.
This is far and away the best article I have read on how things are currently with online dating in Thailand and I’d agree with pretty much everything you said
You will likely become frustrated or just plain bored with dating Thai women at some point if you continue for a considerable period of time. However, if you think the small population of female expats from Western countries offer a solution to those mind-numbing conversations about what you have eaten or whether you are tired, then you are deluding yourselfmon types you will probably meet include a lot of “English teachers” find a wife who are really in Thailand either to party for a year or because they have no career prospects whatsoever, misguided idealists with a savior complex working or volunteering for some ineffectual civil society organization, and various other undesirables fleeing their native shores. Almost universally, these women will have become extremely bitter towards men from their time living in Thailand, and as a Western man, you are the living embodiment of their resentment.
The reality is that Thai society places few clear limits or restrictions on personal behavior for us Westerners. You will have to come to it on your own when you have reached your limit. Maybe it’s after 10 women, maybe it’s after 100 women, maybe it’s after 1000 women. Whatever the number, make sure that you can get out before you are completely past redemption. When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
While these are just the generalities and there are certainly exceptions, they reflect an underlying truth that Westerners often have difficulty understanding or accepting. We would like to consider ourselves more advanced in most ways and maintain an inner narrative of the rich-world hero saving a poor Thai woman from a life of third-world squalor. Maybe even of carving our own Galatea out of the sensuous Thai ivory. But Thais definitely don’t see it that way at all, so don’t delude yourself into thinking you are her dream come true. Generally speaking, we are closer to a tolerable concession given the limited set of options available rather than a knight in shining armor.
There is even a vocabulary that has been spawned, and Thai women will tell you they don’t want to be a “holiday girlfriend” (hooking up for a week or two during a vacation) or to do “sex chat” (mutual masturbation via web cam)
Another factor to consider is that most Thai men find it complete anathema for a desirable Thai woman to freely choose to get involved with a foreigner, and there seems to be no limit on the shenanigans one must endure from jealous admirers. It may sound inconsequential but this can prove very trying (as well as dangerous in some alcohol-saturated environments) even for the most easy-going of Western men.
In Bangkok, it was a perfect storm of just the right level of economic development and globalization to generate a high interest in meeting foreign men, an endless supply of young and lonely single women working in the city far away from home and an almost perfect innocence about internet dating from sheer lack of experience.
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