Her mother wanted a $35,000 dowry and $2,000 a month just to prove I was serious. I still don't know if I dodged a bullet.

I'm 50, divorced, and Australian. After several trips to Thailand I decided I wanted to try to find someone I could actually build a future with there, not just another holiday every year, something I'd already done enough times to know it wasn't filling me up on its own.

I met a Thai woman called Mali on a dating site. She had an excellent education, spoke perfect English, and had a good job in Bangkok, something to do with finance I never fully got my head around no matter how many times she explained it. We spent months talking every day over video calls while we were both working, fitting the conversations in between meetings and shifts, her early in her morning and me late in my afternoon. I remember one of those early calls, when she asked me, with a bluntness that pleasantly surprised me after so many empty profiles on the app, what exactly I was looking for at fifty and why Thailand specifically. I answered just as honestly, no dressing it up, and I think that conversation set the tone for everything that came after. Before long we were making serious plans for me to fly over and meet her in person.

The day I arrived, still jet-lagged, she told me we'd be going that same evening to her brother's engagement party, something she hadn't mentioned in much detail during our calls.

During the ceremony I watched him hand over what turned out to be around US$20,000 in dowry money to his fiancée's mother, a stack of notes placed on a gold tray with more ceremony than I'd ever seen given to handing over cash. It felt dodgy because the bride looked miserable the whole time, none of the smiles you'd expect that day, staring at the floor more than she looked at her fiancé. Mali whispered at the time that it was probably just normal nerves for any Thai bride at her engagement party, and in that moment I had no reason not to believe her.

About a week later, it all fell apart. She claimed she'd had a miscarriage, called off the engagement, disappeared completely with no way to reach her, and it later came out, through the family, that she'd never been pregnant in the first place. Mali's brother had borrowed all that money from various relatives and friends and had just been scammed beyond any doubt. It definitely opened my eyes, because you don't often hear about Thai men getting caught out like that, the stories that usually go around run the other way entirely. Mali's brother spent the rest of my visit practically locked in his room, barely coming out even for meals, and the whole family talked about it in whispers whenever I walked into a room, as if my presence reminded them of something they'd rather not have to explain to a foreigner sitting at their table.

As for my own relationship, things started going downhill almost immediately, though at the time I tried not to make too much of it.

Mali's mum stayed in Bangkok with us for the whole visit, so every day there was another fresh excuse why we couldn't spend time together alone, an urgent errand, a family visit, a headache that showed up right when I suggested going out for dinner. At first I understood it, family first and all that, it was understandable after her brother's whole drama. But after several days in a row of plans cancelled at the last minute, I eventually gave up waiting and carried on with the rest of my trip alone, visiting temples on my own, eating solo in restaurants clearly meant for couples, and even taking a three-day trip to Cambodia without her, somewhere I'd wanted to see for a while, though I ended up doing it with a mix of anger and resignation rather than the excitement I'd planned the whole trip around months earlier.

Right before I flew home, she finally met me again, almost as if she'd waited for the clock to run out. We spent one amazing night together, talking late into the night about everything we'd missed those two weeks, laughing about how absurd it had all been, and I told myself, maybe with more hope than judgement, that everything would be fine from there.

Once I got back to Australia, we went straight back to our usual daily talks and carried on making plans for the future as if nothing had happened, looking at flights, talking about visas, about which city we might eventually live in.

She finally spoke to her mum about us properly, not just in passing like before, and that's exactly when the demands started. Her mother wanted a US$35,000 dowry and US$2,000 every month, starting immediately, just to prove I was serious about her daughter, before we'd even talked about marriage or any actual date.

I'd read enough about sin sod before all this to know there was nothing inherently strange about it, that for most families it's a symbolic gesture of respect towards the bride's parents, not blackmail dressed up as tradition. I told my girlfriend, as calmly as I could manage on that call, that I wasn't against paying a reasonable dowry if we ever genuinely got married, but there was no chance I was paying thousands of dollars every single month before we were even engaged. Sadly, she couldn't go against her mother's wishes, no matter how much she wanted to, and I could hear in her voice that it was tearing her apart just as much as it was me. "It's not that I don't trust you," she told me on one of those calls, her voice breaking, "it's that I can't choose between you and her, and that's exactly what she's asking me to do."

We ended the relationship heartbroken, both of us, but a few months later we met again in Singapore, where she had a work trip and I made a stopover there for a few days, unable to resist the chance to see her again.

We stayed in separate hotels, something she insisted on almost as an unwritten rule, and spent the days walking through Gardens by the Bay and eating at street food stalls like a couple of ordinary tourists with no complicated history behind them. We talked about whether there was any way to make it work, whether her mother might come around with time, whether we ourselves could find some middle ground that didn't involve bankrupting me before we'd even married. But nothing had actually changed, and we both knew it, even if neither of us wanted to say it out loud during those days.

Not long afterwards, each of us back in our own country, she messaged me late one night to say her mother had already made it crystal clear on the financial side. There was no room for negotiation of any kind, not now and probably not ever, no matter how much we both wanted to find some crack to slip through.

I don't blame her at all for any of this, not even a little. I believe we truly loved each other, with the kind of connection that isn't built in a couple of weeks of holiday but in months of real, honest conversation. But her mother cared far more about the money than her own daughter's happiness, and against that no amount of sincere late-night video calling really stands a chance.

It was one of the saddest relationships I've ever been through, and every single Thai person I've spoken to since, friends, colleagues, even a taxi driver on a later trip who brought it up without me mentioning a thing, has told me the same thing: what her mother was doing was very unusual and far from normal in Thailand, an exception and not the rule at all.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd just gone along with it, started sending that $2,000 a month without arguing, just to see how far it would have actually gone before it stopped. I'll never know, and part of me honestly prefers not to find out at this point.

Did I dodge a bullet, or did I really mess up a relationship with the person I was meant to be with, all because I overthought it instead of just taking the risk? Even now, years later, I still don't have a clear answer, and I suspect I never fully will, no matter how much I keep turning it over on quiet nights like this one, replaying the same handful of conversations looking for the moment it could have gone differently.