Her dad had supposedly been in an accident and the hospital wanted money to release him. Months later I met a woman who never asked me for anything.

A few years ago, after separating from the mother of my child, I ended up signing up to one of those dating sites focused on south east Asia, almost out of curiosity more than anything else. I'm 41 and Belgian, from just outside Antwerp. I'd never been to Asia before, knew nothing about the culture or how things worked over there, so all of it was completely new to me, from the names of the cities to the way people wrote, right down to customs I didn't even know existed.

Almost straight away I started getting a flood of messages from people all over the place, more than I knew how to handle that first week, and at a speed that at the time felt flattering rather than suspicious.

The first person I really connected with was from the Philippines. Her name was Rica, she wrote a lot and wrote well, and the first few weeks were pleasant, nothing more. It didn't take long, though, before the requests for help started. First it was a broken washer, something small I sent without thinking twice. Then a birthday gift for a family member. Then her grandma supposedly needed urgent medicine that, according to her, wasn't available at the village pharmacy. And finally, the crown jewel, her dad had supposedly been in an accident and the hospital wanted money upfront to release him or something along those lines, I swear that's literally the excuse she gave me, word for word.

Every week there seemed to be a new emergency, as if the misfortunes in her family took it in turns to knock on the door right when I was starting to let my guard down about the last one, always urgent, always right before a weekend when banks would be closed.

At first I sent her a bit of money each time because I genuinely believed her. Eventually, after the third or fourth emergency, I started asking for proof, a photo of the hospital, of the receipt, of something. She sent them, but something about them never quite added up, the lighting, the angle, a date in the corner that didn't quite match what she'd told me by message that same morning.

I remember the message almost word for word, something like "if you really cared about me you wouldn't think about it so much," sent a minute after I'd written that I needed time to consider it. That was the first time it sounded more like a script than a genuine plea.

When I finally refused to send more help, she got angry almost instantly, no transition at all, as if she'd taken off a mask she'd been wearing since the very first message. Looking back now, I can see exactly what was happening from the start, though at the time it took me several weeks to fully accept it.

I stayed on the sites, but after that I became a lot more careful with everyone, not just her. I spoke to people from very different countries, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and over time I realised where they were from barely mattered when it came to spotting the pattern. So many conversations ended the same way, with a sob story or someone asking for help in one form or another, more or less disguised. One woman asked me for rent money within minutes of saying hello for the first time, almost before I knew her surname or which city she actually lived in. Another tried getting me into some kind of investment with returns that sounded too good to be true and that she could never quite explain properly when I asked specific questions. Someone else wanted me to invest in overseas property without even knowing what she was talking about herself, repeating lines someone had clearly written out for her.

It was then, with my guard fairly well up, that I met a Thai woman who was completely different from all of that. Her name was Fai, and talking to her felt like a breath of fresh air after months of breathing the same stale air. She never once asked where I was from in terms of money, only where I was from in the normal sense, what I ate, what winter was like in Belgium, whether I missed my son when I didn't see him.

We moved over to WhatsApp straight away, spoke every day, and she never asked me for anything, not once, in months of talking. At first she was too shy to talk on the phone because she thought her English wasn't good enough, so for several weeks it was all text messages and short voice notes. Once we finally worked up to an actual call, though, everything flowed naturally, and her English turned out to be far better than she gave herself credit for, with an accent that quickly became familiar to me.

She had a full-time office job, was easy to talk to about anything, from her family to shows we both watched separately and discussed afterwards, and we got a little closer every day. I told her about my son, my separation, why I'd signed up to those sites in the first place without really knowing what I was looking for, and she listened to all of it without judging me once.

Eventually we decided to meet in person. I flew to Thailand, and instead of staying in Bangkok like almost any first timer would, we spent four days together in Phuket, which she already knew well from an earlier trip with friends from work.

Even then I was still cautious because of everything I'd been through, watching every expense with one eye on the past, mentally tallying what I'd paid without quite realising I was doing it. But she never gave me any reason not to trust her. She paid her share without being asked, picked simple, cheap places without me having to suggest it, and not once in those four days did a family emergency pop up, not a broken washer anywhere, not a cousin with sudden health problems.

I particularly remember one afternoon at a viewpoint near Kata, well past midday, when I told her, half joking, that I was still waiting for her to ask me for something. She laughed, genuinely confused, and asked what exactly she'd need to ask me for when she already had a job, a home and a family who loved her. She didn't say anything else on the subject, and that answer stuck with me for the rest of the trip.

Fai ended up visiting me in Europe several times over the following years. Each visit lasted a little longer than the last, she got to know more of my friends, picked up French words without me teaching her, and every goodbye at the airport got a little harder for both of us. On her fifth visit, we got married so we could stay together permanently without relying on tourist visas or expiry dates stamped in a passport. It was a small ceremony at the town hall, with my son as a witness and two friends of hers she'd made over video calls months earlier and was finally meeting in person that same day.

There was no big speech at the wedding itself, just a few words at the town hall and afterwards a simple dinner for four at a Vietnamese restaurant round the corner, since neither of us would have had the nerve for anything more elaborate than that.

A year later we travelled together to see her family, and she introduced me as her husband before I'd even finished taking my shoes off at the door. Her mother made me repeat my name three times and then decided to call me by a Thai nickname I still use without knowing exactly what it means.

Like any couple, we've had our ups and downs, and we've had to work through plenty of cultural differences I hadn't even thought about before meeting her, from how money gets managed within a family to what's considered polite to say or leave unsaid in front of the other's relatives, down to silly things like the right temperature to serve food at. But we've always been willing to listen to each other and find a way to make it work, even when neither of us was quite sure how at the start of an argument.

I'm honestly glad I went through all those scams before meeting Fai. They taught me to slow down and pay attention to details I'd have let slide before, the photo that doesn't quite add up, the emergency that lands right on cue, the question about money that comes up too early in a conversation, before you even know someone's surname.

If you're using dating sites and keep running into the wrong people, don't give up. There are genuine people out there, there really are, even if they sometimes take longer to show up than you'd like. It just takes patience, no rush to find them, and maybe a bit of luck to recognise them once they finally do show up in your messages.