Many of you will have known about me retiring abroad, and my plans to travel around Southeast Asia. Most of you won’t know about my Thai girlfriend Pani. In today’s blog I am going to introduce you to her.
At the beginning of September after I had booked my ticket to Bangkok, I decided I would try online dating for the first time, brave new world and all that.
My initial idea was to try and make some female friends that I could meet up with when I travelled to Thailand, and maybe they could show me around the local sights. I signed up to “ThaiCupid” and started clicking on profile pictures, and sending messages that I was looking for friendship. Before long I started receiving messages from Thai women that wanted a little more than just friendship, and perhaps they wanted some of my money too.
Pani’s profile picture
Pani at work
Pani + food = happy
One of the profile pictures I clicked on was Pani, and I liked the conversations that we were having with each other. I was enjoying talking to Pani, and wasn’t enjoying talking to some of the others. Pani and I started chatting on WhatsApp and didn’t bother with “ThaiCupid” anymore.
We built up a good conversation on WhatsApp and spoke to each other every day. There was a 6 hour time difference between UK and Thailand, so we chatted everyday at 5pm (11pm Thailand) for about an hour. It soon became clear that we had a lot in common, and that we both enjoyed the same sort of things.
This gradually developed into an online relationship where we both felt very fond of each other. We both decided that we wanted to meet each other in person, when I came to Bangkok.
By the time we met up in Bangkok we had spoken to each other every day (via text) for 4 months, and already felt that we knew a lot about each other. The next step was to see if we could continue the relationship in person.
Pani works as a customer care manager, for one of the largest mobile phone operators in Thailand. She lives just outside Bangkok, and drives to work and back each day, a journey of about an hour.