I went to Pattaya to forget a divorce. I ended up proposing to her at Bangkok airport.

I went to Pattaya to forget a divorce.

My brother had been on at me for months. A trip with the lads, two weeks of sun and cheap beer, nothing that time and a beach couldn't fix. I didn't feel like doing anything. I didn't have anything better to do back in London either, so I said yes just to get him to stop asking.

The first time I landed in Pattaya I wasn't expecting anything from the trip beyond switching my brain off for a while. And for two weeks it mostly worked. We stayed out late, slept until midday, and at night, alone back in the hotel room, I still had no interest in checking my phone or catching up on anything from home. I remember little of those days and regret almost none of what I do remember.

I went back for Songkran that same spring, almost on autopilot, without asking myself too hard why. And in October I went a third time, again with my brother, this time with two mates who'd never set foot outside Europe and spent half the week with their mouths open at everything, from the tuk-tuks to the price of a beer.

It was on that third trip that I started noticing a girl who'd been popping up on my Facebook for a while, one of those profiles the algorithm keeps showing you without you knowing quite why. She had an easy smile and a page full of photos with a guy from Bahrain who looked like her boyfriend. I never messaged her. There was nothing to try with someone who already had someone else.

A few nights in, at a club near the beach, my phone buzzed. It was her. She said she'd seen me that same night, at the bar, and had been going back and forth on whether to message me.

I asked what she was doing in Pattaya. She told me she was on holiday with some friends, and that the thing with the guy from Bahrain had ended recently, no drama, just over. We arranged to meet the next day, like we'd been doing it for years.

We had dinner late, at one of those tablecloth-free places where the food turns up before you've even sat down properly. Her name was Nat.

She told me about her daughter, five years old at the time. She told me about her partner, the girl's father, who'd died in a motorbike accident a few months before she was born, so he never got to meet her. She told me about her mother, in a village in Isaan, and about the two people she had to support on her own, which was why she'd left a fixed-hours shop job to do hair and makeup freelance, giving her the flexibility to look after both of them at once.

She told me all of it without asking for anything in return, and that's what threw me more than anything else that night.

When I tried to pay for a bit extra, she refused. When I insisted on giving her money for the taxi back to her hotel, we actually argued about it, until I backed down. She stayed with me for the rest of the trip, and not because I was paying for anything: she just wanted to stay, which, coming from where I was coming from, struck me as almost suspicious at first.

By the day I flew back to London, I already knew this hadn't been a holiday fling. I was in love, or close enough that the difference didn't much matter.

Back in London I couldn't stop thinking about her. I started doing bike deliveries at night, a second job on top of the office one I already had, just so I could send her money without it being a sacrifice for her to accept it. I told her to stop working so many hours, to go back to her village with her daughter and her mother, and that I'd handle the rest.

When my mates found out about all this, they reacted about how you'd expect. My own brother told me I was mad, that this always ended the same way, that I'd been played from day one. They took me out of the group chat without a word. I didn't care. It wasn't their life or their money, and by that point I'd already made a decision I had no intention of discussing with anyone else.

In March I flew back out to Thailand. I'd had the ring in my jacket pocket since before I checked my bag in at Heathrow, bought weeks earlier at a jeweller's near work, barely telling anyone in case they tried to talk me out of it.

I proposed at Bangkok airport, the moment I saw her, before I'd even put down my hand luggage. She said yes right there, in the middle of everyone pushing trolleys out of the terminal, and for a second it felt like nobody else in that airport had noticed what had just happened.

We spent the following days on paperwork: the embassy, forms that had to be signed in duplicate, queues that never seemed to end under the air conditioning of an office in Bangkok. I paid the Sin Sod to her family, no haggling, as is proper. Afterwards we travelled to her village, in Isaan, for a small wedding at her mother's house, with monks in the morning, white string tied around our wrists, and the closest family sitting on plastic chairs under a makeshift awning in the yard. Weeks later we married officially at the local civil registry, a twenty-minute procedure that in practice we'd already been celebrating for months in advance.

I went back to London and started the spouse visa process. It was months of forms, bank letters, proof of income, and a wait that got longer every time I checked my inbox and found nothing new. It came through at the end of August the following year, on a Friday afternoon, while I was halfway through a delivery.

I picked her up from Heathrow and took her round to meet everyone that same week, barely giving her time to get over the jet lag. The same mates who'd removed me from the group chat fell over themselves apologising the moment they met her in person. My brother was the first to admit he'd been wrong about her, though it took him a good while longer to admit he'd been wrong about me.

Since she arrived, she hasn't stopped. She started out waiting tables at a friend of mine's restaurant, long shifts she took on without ever complaining in front of me. A year later she landed a much better job at a hotel in central London, where she still works and where they've already offered her a promotion twice. She sends money to her mother every month, same as before she met me, and not long ago the two of them bought a plot of land for the family in Isaan, something she'd wanted to do for years.

We've been married four years now. When I lost both my parents, one after the other, in almost the same year, it was her who took care of everything I couldn't manage: the calls, the paperwork, the funeral, clearing the house. She's never once brought it up since, and that says a lot about who she is. Her daughter, who's nine now, calls me something I'm not going to translate here, because I can't write it out without my voice cracking.

We're already planning the permanent move to Thailand for when I retire, at 55. She says she wants to go back to Isaan, close to her mother. I say I don't mind where, as long as it's with her.

Not every story like this ends badly. Sometimes it works out exactly the way you'd hope.