We'd been together a year before she officially introduced me to her family. She chose Songkran on purpose, because she said everyone would be in a good mood.

I'm Scottish, 36, and had been dating Praew, 31, for a year when she told me she wanted me to officially meet her family — not in passing, the way it had happened a couple of times before, but properly, with time set aside and everyone present.

She chose Songkran on purpose. She explained that the whole family gathers that week anyway, that the mood is more relaxed than at any other celebration, and that if anything went slightly wrong between us at first, it would always get diluted in the general chaos of the holiday.

We arrived at her parents' house on the second day of the celebrations, once the street portion was over and the quieter part had begun. There were cousins I didn't know, aunts who eyeballed me with a curiosity they didn't bother hiding, and her father, sitting in a chair on the porch, who barely said a word to me for the first hour.

Praew had warned me about this too — that her father needed time, that it wasn't hostility, just caution, and that Songkran, with its fixed ritual and clear steps, would give him a natural excuse to approach me without having to decide all at once what he thought of this foreigner his daughter had brought home.

The key moment came when it was her father's turn to receive the blessing water from the younger family members. Praew signalled discreetly for me to join the line behind her cousins. When my turn came, I poured water over his hands the way I'd watched the others do it, not entirely sure I had the right to, being so new to the family.

Her father didn't say anything special in the moment, just a curt nod. But that night at dinner, he was the first to serve me food without anyone asking him to — a small gesture that Praew later admitted, in the car on the way back, she'd been waiting a year to see.

We went back to that same house the following Songkran, and this time her father was already waiting with a bucket of water prepared just for me before we'd even reached the door — something that, in his family according to Praew, is close to a full declaration of acceptance.

We got married eight months later, in a small wedding that looked nothing like the organised chaos of that first Songkran. But when I think about the exact moment I stopped being Praew's foreign boyfriend and became just part of the family, I always think of that bucket of water waiting for me at the door.