I had over a hundred matches on a dating app my first night in Asia. One crossed a border to meet me, and turned out to be married, with three kids.

Before covid I spent four years working in the hydro power industry across Northern Thailand, Isan and Laos. Now I'm living a fairly boring 9-5 back in Australia, spreadsheet mornings, allocated car park, instant coffee, but those four years gave me more stories than I can remember, some I haven't even told my closest mates.

This one is from my very first week in Southeast Asia.

I was 26, had just landed my first proper contract as a hydro engineer, and had relocated from a regional farming town in the middle of Australia where my dating options were essentially zero. No cinema, no bars with new faces, no apps with more than three active profiles within a hundred kilometres. Most weekends back there meant a counter meal at the pub with the same six people I'd known since primary school. I landed in Vientiane having never set foot in Asia, with a bag too big and no idea what I was walking into.

The heat was different walking out of the airport, thick, sticky, nothing like the dry heat I was used to. Then came that strange feeling of having gone back in time: motorbikes everywhere, wires crossing the streets in every direction, street markets, buildings that looked like they hadn't changed in forty years. I stood outside the terminal for a good while just looking before I bothered finding a taxi.

Poverty was visible everywhere, tin roofs next to empty lots, dogs asleep in the middle of side streets, and yet the local people seemed happy, smiling constantly, none of the closed-off attitude I was used to back home. And the women were attractive, feminine, with a humble nature completely unlike anything I knew back in Australia.

I'm in decent shape, train regularly, but back home I rarely got noticed by anyone, not at the gym, not at the pub, not anywhere. In Vientiane I felt like a celebrity on day one. Looks, smiles, the odd giggle from groups of friends as I walked past a market stall. I didn't quite know what to do with that, so mostly I just smiled back like a happy idiot.

Problem was almost nobody spoke English, so any attempt at conversation on the street or at a food stall died within two minutes of gestures and nervous laughter on both sides. That first night, alone in my hotel room with nothing else to do, I downloaded a dating app, mostly out of boredom, no real expectations attached. Within a few hours I had over a hundred matches. Back home in the town I'd be lucky to get one a day, and usually from someone I'd known my whole life.

I scrolled through without much of a plan for a while, still not quite believing the numbers, until one profile stood out from the rest. A Thai woman named Noi, slightly older than me, living in Bangkok but currently visiting family just over the border, in Nong Khai. We started messaging that same night. I told her I'd just arrived, didn't know anyone in the city, and the idea of spending the whole week alone had me a bit on edge. I asked her, half-joking, if she'd want to cross over to Vientiane to meet me. She agreed without making it complicated, like crossing a border to meet a stranger was the most normal thing in the world.

We met outside a restaurant the next day, mid-afternoon. Stunning. Short, slender, great shape, no tattoos, dressed like she'd stepped out of a magazine rather than a border town. She spoke perfect English, barely any accent, which she said was from living in Europe for work for a couple of years. At the time it seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation, even impressive.

A few more years in Thailand later I'd come to understand that English that good usually means English-speaking boyfriends, not language schools or cultural exchanges. But I'd learn that much later, with other women, in other cities.

We ordered a huge spread of food she picked without even looking at the menu, like it was her regular spot, and she talked me into trying raw prawns doused in lime and chilli that my stomach greeted with a lot less enthusiasm than I did. We laughed a lot, her correcting my pronunciation of a couple of Thai words, me trying not to think too hard about the prawns. Then drinks at a bar overlooking the Mekong, dark by then, Thailand's lights flickering on the other side of the water. Then back to her hotel, one of the nicest in Laos, marble lobby, a bellhop who opened the door for us like we were somebody important, which, fresh off a three-street town, made me feel like I'd stepped into someone else's life.

Then a nightclub packed on a random Tuesday, something that would've seemed impossible on a weeknight back home, deafening Thai music, towering beer towers on every table, partying deep into the early hours. I couldn't believe a woman that small could keep pace with me drinking, then overtake me, without it ever showing.

Roadside noodle soup at 4am, sitting on plastic stools under fluorescent light surrounded by people who looked like they'd had the same night we had, tuk-tuk back with the warm air on my face, and altogether a night I can still remember whole, detail by detail.

Morning came and she headed back to Nong Khai, on the other side of the border.

We kept chatting on WhatsApp over the following days as she flew back to Bangkok and I started settling into the project, learning the names of Thai and Lao colleagues I couldn't quite pronounce right the first time. Normal messages, the odd photo from her flight, vague plans to meet up again if I ever made it to the capital.

One evening, with nothing better to do and that dumb curiosity that sometimes costs you, I looked her up on Facebook.

She was married. To a European man considerably older than her. And they had three kids together, all three with that mix of features that gave away exactly who the father was.

The photos made it pretty clear the husband wasn't just older, he was wealthy: a house that didn't look real, pool and garden kept up by someone who wasn't her, cars I'd never afford even working another thirty years, holidays filling entire albums in places I'd only ever seen in magazines. I sat there staring at the screen for a while, scrolling back through the photos, looking for some date, something that would disprove it. I didn't find anything like that. If anything, the older photos made it worse — this wasn't new, it had clearly been the arrangement for years.

I grew up in a fairly conservative family and always respected marriage as a kind of line you don't cross, so I didn't really know how to feel. I hadn't known beforehand, so technically it wasn't my fault, but I was still left with an uncomfortable feeling that didn't shift easily.

I decided not to say anything or confront her about it. I sat on it for a couple of days, thinking about messaging something, some indirect question to see what she'd say, but in the end I couldn't see the point. There was nothing to gain, and I didn't want to be the one who caused drama in someone else's family, thousands of kilometres away, in a country where I'd been living a week and she'd lived her whole life. I just moved on, stopped turning it over in my head, and over time, with no awkward conversation ever happening, we stopped messaging altogether.

It was a pretty sharp introduction to a reality that would take years, and a fair few more women, to fully understand: marriage doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, and a ring on a finger doesn't always tell the whole story, especially when the husband lives a flight away and there's enough money that nobody asks too many questions.

The funny part, looking back now with four full years of Thailand and Laos behind me, is that if her family hadn't been visiting Nong Khai that particular week, she'd never have crossed into Vientiane to meet me. The whole night, the club, the raw prawns, the 4am noodle soup, all of it hinged entirely on a family calendar coincidence on the other side of a border. A geographic fluke, nothing more.

It was an eye-opening first week, the very first one I spent in Asia, and I hadn't even made it to Thailand yet. The four years that followed gave me plenty more stories like it, some worse, one or two even better, but none of them stuck with me quite like this one, precisely for being the first. It set the tone for everything that came after, in a way I only really appreciate now, sitting at a desk on the other side of the world.