The reason for the visa rejection nearly made my head explode: she couldn't pronounce my name.

My name's Craig, I'm 55, from Perth, Australia, and I've been going to Thailand for about 12 years now, clocked up more than 35 trips if I sit down and count them all properly, and I almost always end up in Pattaya out of habit more than anything else. I've had some great times there over the years, met some interesting women along the way, the odd relationship that lasted a few months and not much more, but nothing that ever really stuck, nothing permanent or close to what I was looking for without quite admitting it to myself.

A few years back I decided to try Hua Hin for a change, tired of the same old routine in Pattaya and curious about a quieter Thai city, less geared towards the party crowd. I'd met a woman online before travelling, we'd been messaging for a few weeks before the flight, and I spent a few nights with her right after I landed. Within a week she started with the "I want this" and "I need that" routine, each message a bit more insistent than the last. I packed my bags that same afternoon and walked straight out the door, no arguing, no explanations of any kind.

I ended up walking around the city with all my luggage, sweating in the midday sun and already pretty tired of the day, with no real plan beyond getting away from that apartment as fast as possible. I went into a quiet little bar, the kind that barely catches your eye from the street, just to sit down for a bit and have a beer in peace.

I asked one of the girls at the bar, in basic English backed up with plenty of gestures, if she knew anywhere nearby I could stay that night. She pointed straight at a five-star hotel across the street, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world and price wasn't a problem for anyone. That annoyed me enough, more the tone than the suggestion itself, that I just stayed put and started drinking instead of continuing the search on my own.

The bar manager, seeing me sitting there looking thoroughly unimpressed with my luggage piled up next to the table, stepped in and told me she had a girl who could take me to a decent hotel nearby. Off I went with this girl, young, quiet, who didn't speak a single word of English, not one, not even the basics most people manage in tourist areas.

She walked me about twenty minutes through streets I didn't recognise to what was genuinely the worst hotel I'd stayed at in Thailand in twelve years of travelling there, a room that smelled of damp with a fan that made more noise than actual air. Twenty dollars a night, nothing outrageous, and I found out later the girl pocketed half of that as a kickback for bringing me there, apparently a fairly common arrangement between bars and cheap hotels in the area that I knew absolutely nothing about at the time.

I went back to the bar that same night, partly out of habit and partly because I had nothing better to do, and had a lot of drinks with her for the rest of the night while we communicated through gestures, the translator app on my phone, and a fair amount of patience on both sides. Since I had no idea how to find the hotel again on my own through those unnamed streets, she ended up walking me back when the bar closed, mostly in silence for the whole way.

That was the beginning of it, though I had no way of knowing that at the time and wouldn't have believed anyone who'd told me. We upgraded hotels pretty quickly, to somewhere much better than the first, with actual hot water and none of that damp smell, and started spending real time together, not just loose nights of beer and gestures. We travelled to Laos and Cambodia for New Year, crossing land borders with our bags on our backs like a couple of ordinary backpackers, sleeping in cheap rooms and eating from street stalls she always picked far better than I ever could.

We ended up living together in Hua Hin for about two months, in a small apartment near the night market she loved wandering through every evening. Her name was Fah, she was 26, and she was studying English in the evenings at a school in town while working at a massage shop during the day, an exhausting schedule that barely left her any free time between the two. I went back to Australia to sort out a retirement visa, a slower and more bureaucratic process than I'd expected, and was back in Thailand within a few months, eager to pick up right where we'd left off. Eventually I bought a small condo in Pattaya, my usual city, and she kept up her English studies while I went back and forth between the two countries sorting out paperwork, visas, and all the rest of it nobody really explains properly until you have to deal with it yourself.

When I asked if she'd like to come to Perth with me, the two of us sitting on the apartment balcony one ordinary evening, she said yes immediately, almost before I'd even finished asking the question. We went through the whole visa process, forms, paperwork, interviews, and after months of waiting got rejected outright. The reason border control gave us nearly made my head explode from sheer disbelief when I first read it in the letter.

When immigration had called her in Thailand to verify the application details, a routine call lasting only a few minutes, she couldn't remember how my name was pronounced as it appeared written in my passport, a name she'd seen written down for months but had never actually needed to say out loud in front of anyone. That was, literally, word for word according to the official document, the main reason for the rejection.

My name is genuinely difficult to pronounce for someone who doesn't speak English as a first language, a combination of sounds even plenty of native speakers get wrong the first time, so I couldn't even be fully angry about the situation, much as I would have liked someone specific to blame for all of it.

I spent about three hours straight that same afternoon teaching her to say it properly, syllable by syllable, repeating it over and over until she got it right without hesitating once. We applied again from scratch. A year later we were married in Perth, in a simple ceremony with very few guests, just close family and a handful of friends, but with plenty of genuine emotion in the air all day.

That was five years ago now. She runs a massage shop in Perth that's doing really well, regular clients and good reviews, speaks excellent English now, with an Australian accent on some words even, nothing like that girl who couldn't understand a word in the bar in Hua Hin, and we're still very much in love with each other after all this time, something I wasn't taking for granted anymore at 55.

Turns out that bar in Hua Hin was the first bar she'd ever worked in, only a few weeks before I walked through the door, and I was the first farang guy she'd ever been with in any real sense, which explained completely why she didn't know a word of English that first night or have any of the polish other girls in the scene had picked up after years in the job.

I think about this every now and then, especially on anniversaries or on quiet nights at home once she's already asleep, about how different everything could have been if that first woman I met online hadn't pushed so hard so early, or if the girl at the first bar hadn't been busy, or if I'd simply chosen a different street that afternoon. Twelve years of trips to Thailand, thirty-five of them counted one by one, and it turns out what I'd been looking for the whole time without knowing it was waiting in the most boring looking bar in a city I'd only gone to on something of a whim.

I walked into the most boring looking bar in Hua Hin, in a bad mood, with my luggage at my feet and no intention of staying long. I walked out of there, weeks later, with the woman who'd become my future wife. Sometimes things just work out, with no better explanation than that.