I spent my student loan on a week of heartbreak in Bangkok. I went back nine more times, and on one of those trips I met my wife.

I lost my first serious girlfriend to a wealthy American, and without realising it, that loss ended up leading me to the life I have now.

Growing up, I spent my summers in California with family, so Americans never struck me as especially exotic or interesting. Time would prove that a fairly serious miscalculation.

I was studying in Sheffield, in the north of England. She was Japanese, in my year, and for a year and a half she was the closest thing to a future I had planned out at nineteen. We talked about visiting Japan together one summer, about what we'd do after graduating, the kind of talk you have when you still believe a university relationship can last forever.

One summer she flew to Los Angeles to visit a cousin. She came back different. She'd met an American, considerably older than her, the kind with a house with a pool and a job that sounded important even though nobody could quite explain what it actually was. She told me over the phone, in the calm voice of someone who'd already made up her mind before making the call. She married him less than a year later.

I was twenty, and my pride was in pieces.

It was 2005, and I reacted the way any English student reacts when his heart has just been broken: badly, and with borrowed money. I called the faculty office, said I was ill, took the next instalment of my student loan before I had time to think twice, and booked a week in Bangkok. In my head, the plan made perfect sense: excess and adventure as a cure. At twenty, almost any plan does.

I landed in the small hours, hit by that thick, humid heat the moment the airport doors open, the kind no travel brochure quite captures. I hadn't slept on the plane. I had no plan beyond making it through the week without running out of money before the last day, something I turned out to badly underestimate.

Not really knowing what I was looking for, only that I didn't want to be back in Sheffield watching it rain, I spent the first nights in Nana Plaza, tagging along with two other Englishmen from my hostel who'd been there longer and appointed themselves my guides. Nana had something of a theme park about it, all lights and loudspeakers, and it left me cold. It was one night, drifting over towards Soi Cowboy, that I understood almost immediately that this street suited me far better. Less manufactured. More real noise, fewer flashing signs.

Over the following nights, exploring the area on my own, I found a three-storey bar that, to my taste, is still the best place I've ever set foot in. Every floor had its own music, none of it bleeding into the others, and the drinks were reasonable, even for an English student's budget. By the third night the staff already recognised me walking in, which, at twenty and with nobody back home waiting for a phone call, felt like a small victory. I went back every night I had left in the city, the way you return to a corner where, for the first time in months, you're not thinking about anyone else.

One of those nights I met a girl who, without meaning to, did a better job than any therapist at getting the heartbreak out of my system. At the end of the night she thanked me, which wasn't something I expected at all, and which I still remember more fondly than the situation probably deserves. We didn't talk much. We didn't need to.

I spent the rest of the week watching my money disappear in Baht, night after night, until I felt like the classic broke gambler standing at the edge of the table, watching everyone else still playing with chips he no longer had. I did the maths on the last day, sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, and I had just enough left for a sandwich and a coffee. I went back to Sheffield without a penny, carrying seven days' worth of accumulated hangover and one very clear idea: next time, I'd come back better funded.

---

A couple of years passed. I was in my final year of university and, between summer jobs, a weekend job I hated, and more discipline than I knew I had, I'd managed to save around thirty thousand pounds. Over my early twenties I made about ten trips to Thailand: Bangkok again, Pattaya, the islands, pretty much everywhere you can cover without leaving the country. Every trip was different from the last. Each time, I went home to England a little less broken than the time before.

On one of those trips, in Koh Samui, I met the woman who is now my wife.

There was no three-storey bar and no Soi Cowboy this time. I met her in daylight, in a restaurant facing the beach where she'd been working since she was sixteen, first as a waitress and, by the time I met her, more or less running the lunch shift on her own. I asked her something fairly stupid about the menu, just to keep talking to her for one more minute. She knew exactly what I was doing, and let me know it without saying a word, with a half-smile that, years later, still disarms me the same way it did the first time.

I stayed in Koh Samui for the rest of that trip, changing plans without telling anyone back home, and went back the following month with an excuse for a holiday that nobody in my family quite believed. Over the next two years I made the rest of my ten trips almost always to the same place, staying a little longer each time and talking to her a little more each time, until the visits stopped being holidays and became the entire reason for the trip. I met her family, learned to eat whatever she put in front of me without asking what it was, and learned, more slowly, to stop comparing every one of her gestures to the ones from the girl who'd left me in Sheffield.

I asked her to marry me on the same beach where I'd first met her, a couple of years after that first stupid conversation about the menu. We got married not long after, a small wedding, almost all her family and almost none of my friends, who didn't quite believe it was real until they saw the photos.

I talked her into coming to England, first to visit and later to stay, and that was more than ten years ago now. It wasn't easy for her the first few winters: the cold, the lack of light, a language she'd mastered but that sounded different coming from my neighbours. Today she lives with me in the north of England, in a town considerably greyer than Koh Samui, and we have two daughters who are, without any real competition, the best thing that's ever happened to me. They speak Thai with their mother at home and correct my pronunciation every time I try, without any mercy at all.

Sometimes I think about that week in 2005, about the borrowed money and about the girl from Soi Cowboy I never saw again. I think, too, about my ex, the one who married the American with the pool. If she hadn't left me that summer, I'd never have taken out that loan under the pretence of being ill, never have gone back ten more times looking for something I couldn't even name, and never have ended up in a restaurant in Koh Samui asking stupid questions about the menu to the woman I now share a house, daughters, and an entire life with.

Not every Thailand story ends badly. Mine certainly doesn't.