I dodged financial disaster with Charm. With Gop and her daughter I ended up as Papa without ever planning it.

My name's Mark, I'm 54, American, and this story starts when I visited Thailand for two weeks, one in Chiang Mai and one in Bangkok. I ended up staying far, far longer than I'd originally planned.

Before arriving I'd been talking to a few women online for weeks, like almost everyone does before a first trip, swapping photos and vague plans about what to do together once I landed. One of them picked me up at the airport as soon as I touched down, with a handwritten sign with my name on it, something that struck me as charming at the time. We spent the whole day together, eating, walking around, talking about our lives, and I paid for absolutely everything without a second thought because that's how I assumed these things were supposed to work. That same night, back at the hotel, she mentioned in passing that she had a medical procedure scheduled for the next day and wouldn't be able to see me. I never heard from her again, not a call, not a message, nothing.

I met another woman who worked in the court system, a judge or something along those lines from what I could gather through gestures and half-sentences, and had a good time with her for a couple of days, quiet dinners, a walk or two around downtown. But entire conversations run through Google Translate got exhausting pretty fast, typing out each sentence on the phone, waiting for the translation, reading the translated reply back and trying to guess what nuance had gotten lost along the way. There's only so much you can say with a phone acting as the middleman before the whole thing starts feeling more like an exercise in patience than an actual date.

Then I met a woman called Charm who spoke very good English and seemed comfortable with Western ways, which struck me as an enormous relief at the time after so much translator-app back and forth. I flew her down from Chiang Mai to Bangkok to meet up, and we got on really well those first few days.

She was 44, cute and playful, and had been married to an American who'd passed away, leaving her with a son, a farm, and a house in her name. After him, another American had invested in a fairly big new house she was still paying off years later, despite no longer living there or having any relationship with her whatsoever.

The warning signs came quickly, faster than I'd like to admit looking back now. She complained about our choice of hotels as if nothing was ever quite good enough, not even four-star places I thought were perfectly reasonable. She wanted a hi-so lifestyle, talked about it constantly, specific brands, specific restaurants, the kind of life she saw on social media from other women her age. She kept several male friends active on dating apps, something I discovered by accident glancing at her phone one day, and got defensive the moment I asked her about it, changing the subject or flat out getting angry and accusing me of not trusting her. One night, at a fairly expensive restaurant, she ordered enough food for five people when it was just the two of us at the table, and then barely touched half of it.

Things got worse when she started suggesting I cover her monthly car payments, and help fund a trip for her son to come visit me in the US, a trip she'd already promised the kid without so much as asking me first.

When I pushed back on all this, she told someone I was angry and felt used. She wasn't entirely wrong about the second part, if I'm honest. I cut things off right there and moved on with the trip. In time I came to understand I'd dodged something that probably would have cleaned me out completely.

In Bangkok I met a woman online called Gop who took time off work just to meet me in person. At the time I thought she was simply being friendly, nothing more. Looking back now, I think she was making sure no other man got a look in before her.

She helped me find a decent room near her neighbourhood, haggling with the landlord in rapid Thai I could barely follow, I enrolled in Thai language classes at a school downtown three afternoons a week, and slowly started getting a real feel for the city and the culture, beyond the tourist spots and bar areas I'd known during my first few weeks. It was honestly a good period of my life, I was learning fast, making friends among the other students at the school, and genuinely enjoying every day, without that constant sense of being evaluated I'd had with Charm.

As time went on, Gop's seven-year-old daughter started coming around more and more whenever we were together. A hyperactive kid with some developmental issues nobody seemed to have properly diagnosed. The public school she attended had no special needs support at all, and she was falling further behind every term without anyone really doing much about it.

I spent several weeks researching options, visiting schools, asking questions that probably sounded strange coming from a foreigner with no official relationship to the kid, until I found a private school with a serious support programme and teachers specifically trained for it. I enrolled her in an English-based curriculum and took on the tuition without giving too much thought to whether it was really my place to. Four years on she speaks great English, better than plenty of adults I know, and has the confidence now to get somewhere in life, something neither she nor her mother had ever really taken for granted before.

I went back to the US a few months later, my head still spinning from everything I'd lived through, and decided that was really all I needed to know to make a big decision. I made plans to return permanently on a retirement visa, sold off things I no longer needed, closed out matters I'd been putting off for years. I came back, found a two-bedroom apartment a comfortable distance from where Gop lived, and settled in without rushing, buying furniture bit by bit, learning where the nearest market was and which noodle shop in the neighbourhood was actually worth going to. Gop's daughter started calling me Papa on her own, out of nowhere one ordinary day, no one suggesting it or planning for it. I didn't correct her, not then and not since.

Life now is split between Bangkok and the US, a few months here, a few months there, with Gop and her daughter at the centre of all of it. Gop works and supports her parents independently, without ever relying on me for that or even asking me to. I cover rent, food, and school fees, travel whenever I feel like it without having to explain myself too much, and have been through more countries in the last few years than in all the decades before that combined, something I never would have imagined about myself at fifty. I know enough Thai to get around comfortably on my own, order food, haggle at the market, chat with the taxi driver, though deep conversations are still completely beyond me and probably always will be.

I went into this whole thing moving too fast and having no idea what I was doing, letting myself get swept up in the first attention I got in a new country, exactly the kind of thing every guide warns about that nobody reads until it's too late. Charm could have been a significant financial disaster if I'd given her any more room than I did, and for a while I wondered whether I'd been just as naive with Gop without realising it. But somewhere along the way, without ever planning to, I ended up making a real difference in the life of a kid who didn't have many options within the system she'd been born into. That wasn't the plan when I set out on a trip meant to last two weeks, and even so, looking back with all the distance the years give you, I don't regret any of it.

Take your time, actually know what you're looking for before you get on that plane, and don't jump at the first person who pays you attention, no matter how good it feels after a long flight and a lonely hotel room. That's the main thing I'd tell anyone heading to Thailand for the first time.