It sounded exactly like the scam I'd been hearing about in Thailand for twenty-five years. Instead of sending the money, I got on a flight.

I'm 54, Austrian, and I've been going to Thailand for around twenty-five years.

I went for the first time with my then-wife and our young son, who could barely walk yet. We spent three months there every winter, escaping the Central European cold and, without quite realising it at first, quite a bit more than that too. I fell in love with the country because of the people and the way of life, not the nightlife, something a lot of people find hard to believe when I tell them after twenty-five years of going. I still remember the first time a neighbour invited us to eat without knowing us at all, just because our son had started playing with his in the street. That's the kind of thing that hooked me, not the beaches.

My marriage ended years later, by which point my son was a teenager, and I kept going alone, at first out of habit and later because I no longer knew what else to do with my winters. I tried dating apps when another relationship I'd started back home also fell apart, but most of the women I spoke to either wanted something completely different or something casual while passing through, which is perfectly fine, just not what I was after at that stage of my life. After yet another conversation going nowhere, I came fairly close to giving up on the whole thing and just enjoying Thailand on my own, without complicating it any further.

I particularly remember one conversation from that period, with a woman who by the second message was already asking how much I travelled for work and how much I earned, without even knowing my surname yet. I wasn't rude about it, I just stopped replying. Another one made it clear by the third date that she wanted something with no strings attached while I was passing through, which is fair enough, just not what I was looking for in my fifties.

I nearly deleted the apps for good more than once that year. There's only so many times you can have the same opening exchange, the same questions about how long you're staying and whether you're single "for real," before it starts to feel less like dating and more like a job interview nobody warned you about.

It was then, on one of those trips where I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, that I met a Thai woman who was pregnant. Her name was Aom, she worked near where I was staying, and we started spending time together almost every day of that trip, nothing serious at first, we didn't even flirt much. We just got on well and enjoyed each other's company without overthinking it, coffee in the mornings or just sitting talking while she rested her swollen feet from the pregnancy.

When I came back to Thailand the following winter, we picked up exactly where we'd left off, as though no time had passed in between at all.

She introduced me to her newborn son, showed me around her village near Kanchanaburi, took me to meet her friends and part of her family, and never once asked me for money. We were simply good friends, and honestly I never expected it to turn into anything else. We'd sit out in front of her house in the afternoons while the baby slept, talking about everything and nothing, about the school he'd go to one day, about my job back in Austria, about why my marriage hadn't worked out, and those afternoons became the part of the trip I missed most once I was back in Europe.

After spending several months like that, I went back to Europe and we kept talking every single day on Line, good mornings, photos of the baby growing, how work had gone, the odd photo from the market or of rain hitting the corrugated roof of her house. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of daily contact that makes you realise someone has become important without you knowing exactly when it happened, the sort of thing that sneaks up on you between one ordinary message and the next. Friends back in Austria started asking about her before I'd even fully worked out what was going on between us myself, and answering them forced me to think it through more carefully than I had up to that point.

About nine months later, she asked me for help for the first time.

Her mother had been badly injured and needed over 60,000 baht for medical treatment. It sounded exactly like the stories I'd been hearing for twenty-five years in Thailand, the ones every foreigner who spends enough time there eventually hears from a friend, an expat forum, someone leaning on a bar. So instead of transferring the money that same evening, which is probably what I'd have done a few years earlier, I booked a flight to Thailand to see it with my own eyes.

When I got there, it was all true. I went with her straight to the hospital from the airport, still dragging my suitcase, and met her mother in the bed, an arm in a cast and her face still swollen from the fall. She barely spoke English, but she took my hand for a moment and said something Aom only translated much later, once we were in the taxi back, that she was sorry our first trip together had to be to meet her like this. I saw they'd already sold the family car to help cover the first round of bills, and understood Aom hadn't lied to me about a single thing. There was no elaborate story, no manufactured urgency, just a family without much to fall back on trying to claw its way out of a situation that had spiralled completely out of their hands, the kind of ordinary bad luck that has nothing to do with anyone trying to take advantage of a foreigner.

I gave them €5,000 to help with the immediate medical costs, and later, once her mother was home recovering, another €5,000 so she could buy a modest car and get around again without relying on anyone.

That was four years ago, and we've been together ever since. I've become part of her family, and she's become part of mine. My son, all grown up now, loves visiting Thailand and gets on brilliantly with all of them, especially with Aom's boy, who follows him around like a shadow every time they're both there.

I've also invested around €15,000 improving the family's home, so we all have somewhere comfortable to stay when we're in Thailand. We did the roof first, since it leaked every time it rained hard, then the bathroom, then the kitchen, bit by bit, no rush, one new thing each trip rather than trying to do it all at once. The last time I was there, Aom's mother proudly showed me the new ceiling fan in the living room as if it were the most important thing that had happened all year, and for her it probably was.

Sundays when I'm there have turned into something of a tradition of their own. The whole family piles in, uncles arriving by motorbike from the next village over, cousins of Aom's who use my first name without hesitating anymore, and we all sit and eat on the floor of the terrace I helped put a roof over a couple of years back. My son always sits next to the boy, who's now old enough to chase chickens round the yard and to try teaching my son Thai words that come out badly mangled, to everyone's amusement.

I've never really been one for talking about Thai family as some kind of special concept, the sort of thing you see in expat forums full of theories about how it all works over there. To me it was always something much simpler: people who treat you well because they like you, not because they want something from you or you from them. I was just another farang for years in Thailand, the kind who comes and goes without leaving much of a mark. With Aom's family I stopped feeling like that almost without noticing.

People will probably say I got lucky, and maybe I did. There are so many stories that end the other way round that it would be silly to pretend I didn't think about that too, especially during the flight to the hospital, my head running through every possible scenario before landing. But meeting Aom changed my life completely. I found a family I never expected to find in my fifties, in a village near Kanchanaburi I ended up in almost by accident, and honestly I've never been happier than I am now, at an age when I'd already stopped expecting anything like this could still happen to me. Whatever comes next, I'm fairly sure I'll spend it on that terrace near Kanchanaburi, with the ceiling fan running and someone's cousin arriving on a motorbike right on cue.