They sat us at the same staffroom desk because there was nowhere else free. Two years later, she's the reason I never asked for the transfer to Bangkok.

I'm British, 35, and I've spent four years teaching English at a bilingual school in Udon Thani, the kind of school that exists in the city precisely because there's enough of an expat community and internationally minded middle-class Thai families to sustain it.

I arrived after five years teaching in Bangkok, tired of the traffic, the cost of living, and a city I never quite managed to feel was mine despite the time I'd put in. An old university friend told me about an opening in Udon Thani, a smaller school, similar salary, much lower cost of living. I said yes without thinking too hard about it.

On the first day, the academic director assigned me a desk in the staffroom next to Waan's, who taught social studies and Thai to the primary grades, simply because it was the only spot free. No particular intention behind it, just the dull logic of furniture availability.

Waan was 33, had been at the school for eight years, and from the start took it as something of a personal mission to correct my pronunciation of my students' Thai names, something I appreciated after years in Bangkok mispronouncing kids' names with no one ever correcting me out of excessive politeness.

We shared the staffroom eight hours a day, five days a week. We talked about the difficult students, the latest interminable staff meeting, which food stall near the school was worth it that day. None of it seemed, at the time, like more than the normal chat between two colleagues who got on well.

It took me over a year to notice I was mentally organising my entire week around whether Waan had playground duty on the same shift as me. And it took quite a bit longer to say anything about it, mostly because at a small school in a not-especially-large city, a rumour about two teachers can become the talk of the staffroom, the parents, and even the students in question, within days.

I finally told her on an end-of-year trip to Nong Khai, on the banks of the Mekong, where we'd gone to chaperone a group of students on an excursion and ended up, late at night, sitting alone together watching the lights of Laos across the river while the rest of the group slept. She laughed, not exactly at me, but at how long it had taken, and told me half the staffroom had already assumed we'd been together for months.

We decided, with a seriousness that now strikes me as a bit excessive, to keep it private for the rest of that school year, mostly for the sake of the students in classes we shared and to avoid giving ammunition to gossip that was already circulating anyway. It worked, more or less, though I suspect the administration knew long before we officially announced anything.

Her family lives in a village near the city, farmers for several generations, and the first visit was less about impressing her parents and more about whether her grandmother, who barely spoke to foreigners, decided she liked me or not. She decided yes, for reasons Waan never fully translated for me, something to do with the way I ate a spicy larb dish without complaining, even though it made me sweat for a solid half hour.

Last year I was offered a better-paid position at an international school in Bangkok, the kind of move I would have accepted without thinking in my early years in Thailand. I turned it down without consulting anyone but Waan, who just asked if I was sure, without pushing me either way.

We're still at the same school, in the same staffroom, though not by furniture chance anymore but because we both explicitly asked to keep sitting together when they redid the space last year. The first-graders we had when we started are now in secondary school, and one of them still asks us, with that tactlessness so particular to children, whether we're going to get married.

We don't have a date yet. But the answer, when it finally comes, is one we've both known for a long time.