A trip to Vietnam taught me to tell lust from love. I went back to Thailand, met a woman 24 years younger than me, and I'm about to propose.

After a trip to Vietnam I understood that what I'd been calling love had mostly been lust.

It was on the flight home, somewhere over the Pacific, that I finally put it together. I'd spent weeks convincing myself I felt something deep for someone I'd barely had a real conversation with, someone I knew almost nothing about beyond what was obvious at a glance. It wasn't a pleasant realization. I landed back in Canada with the uncomfortable feeling of having confused one thing for the other for months, and at 52 I didn't have much appetite left for lying to myself.

So I reinstalled Tinder, but with a much clearer head this time, and a list of things I actually wanted to know before I let myself feel anything. No more mindless swiping, no more getting swept up by the first pretty smile. I asked women about their work, their past, whether they had kids, what they actually wanted out of life, before I even considered meeting anyone in person. Most conversations fizzled out on their own after a message or two, and I was fine with that — better to cut things short than regret it later. I'd caught the Asia bug badly after that trip, and I was clear on one thing: if I was going to find something real, it would be out there, not in the mid-sized Canadian city where I'd lived my whole life and more or less already knew everyone I was ever going to know.

She came up in the results one ordinary night.

Twenty-four years younger than me, Chinese descent, raised in Chiang Rai, sweet-natured, fair English, and a smile that could melt you even in a small, slightly pixelated profile photo taken at an odd angle. I'll call her Flower, which isn't her real name.

We talked for several weeks before I decided on anything. Short video calls at first, most of them with a bad connection, her laughing at my accent whenever I tried repeating some Thai word she'd taught me. Simple questions that got deeper over time: what her family was like, what Chiang Rai was like, why she'd moved to Bangkok, what she expected from a relationship with someone who lived on the other side of the world. She told me about an office job that didn't fulfil her much, a father who'd passed away years earlier, a mother she helped out financially when she could. None of the rehearsed answers I'd learned to spot after Vietnam, nothing that sounded like a script. In late 2022 I booked a flight to Bangkok to meet her in person, more nervous than I'd been in years, not entirely sure what to expect, and we ended up spending the entire three weeks together.

I found her waiting in the arrivals hall at Suvarnabhumi Airport, smaller than she'd looked on video calls, holding a hand-written sign with my name misspelled on purpose just to wind me up. We hugged like we'd known each other for a lot longer than a few weeks of screens.

She took me through Bangkok, Pattaya and Koh Samui, and I loved every bit of all three.

Bangkok blew my mind completely. The public transit system, a BTS and MRT running with a punctuality that only exists in brochures back in Canada. Food everywhere and at every price point, from a street stall for thirty baht to a place with tablecloths, and everything in between on the same block. Golden temples appearing between glass skyscrapers with no warning, like the city hadn't quite decided which century it wanted to live in. The constant friendliness of people, even with how clumsy I was at ordering things. How clean the MRT stations were, so much so that at first it felt strange dropping anything on the floor. And above all, how safe I felt walking around alone at night, something I hadn't expected at all coming from outside.

Pattaya was something else entirely.

The first night, Flower took me straight to Walking Street. Quite an experience with a new girl on your arm, I can tell you. I'm a fairly reserved person, more suited to quiet conversation than crowds, so I'll admit I felt a bit uncomfortable at first amid all the neon, the music blasting at full volume from every bar at once, people calling out to you from every doorway to come in. I must have pulled a memorable face, because she found it absolutely hilarious and spent a good while laughing at me instead of comforting me, imitating my expression every few minutes just to crack up again.

We had one drink at an open-air bar, nobody bothered us the whole time, and I just took it all in — the energy of the place, the mix of people from everywhere in the world, the lights reflected in the wet pavement, the music changing style every few metres, the sheer volume of it all somehow becoming background noise after the first twenty minutes. I completely understand why so many men keep going back there. It's not a judgment, just an observation after living it myself for one night, on the arm of someone who already knew the place by heart.

The drive from Bangkok to Pattaya, and beyond, turned out to be as memorable as either city.

An elephant sanctuary was one of the moments I remember most. No riding, no hooks in sight, just handlers washing and feeding the elephants in a shallow river while explaining where each one had come from and what had happened to it before arriving there. Flower translated whatever slipped past both my English and hers, and we both ended up soaked to the waist helping bathe an elephant who, according to the handler, had a soft spot for bananas and nobody else.

There was also a floating market on one of the drives, wooden boats loaded with fruit and freshly made curry weaving between narrow canals while the vendors haggled boat to boat without even looking at each other. And a dim sum lunch in a small town where we stopped almost by accident, where I was the only Western face in the whole place, sitting at a shared table with a Thai family who insisted on explaining, through gestures and a handful of English words, what each dish was before I tried it, clapping every time my face approved of something.

Brilliant experiences, all of them, the kind you remember in more detail as the years pass rather than less, small things you didn't think you'd noticed at the time surfacing again months later out of nowhere.

Koh Samui, the last stop, was the breather neither of us knew we needed after Bangkok and Pattaya. Whole days with no fixed plans, lying on the sand at Chaweng, grilled fish dinners with sand still on our feet, and the first real conversations about what would happen once I had to go back to Canada. Neither of us had a clear answer, and for the first time in years that didn't scare me.

So that's my little story of how I first met my girlfriend. I've been back four times since, counting down the days before each flight like a teenager, buying ridiculous last-minute things at the airport because they suddenly seemed like the perfect gift, and I'm planning to go back once more, a fifth time, to propose.

It hasn't been a perfectly smooth road. We've had our bumpy patches, some time apart when neither of us was quite sure whether to keep going, video call arguments that cut out mid-sentence over a bad connection and left things worse than before we hung up. There was one stretch, a couple of years back, when we nearly stopped talking altogether for weeks, each of us convinced the other had given up first. But we always come back to each other, without either of us fully planning it, like the distance itself keeps reminding us why it was worth trying.

My kids from an earlier marriage took a while to come around to the age gap, and they still joke about it at family dinners, though I've noticed the jokes carry less bite and more warmth toward her these days. My oldest friends, the same ones I grew up with in that Canadian city where there's nothing left for me to discover, took longer to come around, but after one slightly awkward group video call where she insisted on speaking her limited English instead of letting me translate, most of them changed their tune.

That's probably enough said for now.

I really hope I'm not making a mistake proposing. But after everything we've been through, after how many times we've found our way back to each other with nobody forcing us to, I think I've had plenty of time to be sure. Four visits and a lot of very expensive flights across the Pacific have all led here.