Pattaya is a coastal city near Bangkok, best known for its nightlife and as a hugely popular destination for tourists and foreign retirees. It has a reputation as a place where genuine love stories and much murkier situations coexist, and the stories collected here reflect exactly that double face. There are sailors and passing travelers who met someone special in a bar in the city, alongside accounts of people who had to learn, sometimes the hard way, to tell genuine interest apart from someone only after money or a visa.
A divorce sent me to Pattaya on holiday with my brother. There I met Nat, a single mother who'd lost her partner before her daughter was born. I fell in love, started doing bike deliveries at night to support her, and months later proposed at Bangkok airport. We've been married four years now in London.
I was 60 when Kop, 37 years younger than me, brought me to her cousin's wedding in a village in Isaan. I met her parents, slept apart from her out of respect for her family's rules, and watched a full traditional Thai wedding, dowry included, feeling for a few hours like part of a family I barely knew.
At 52 I flew to Thailand to meet Chompoo, my Messenger girlfriend, in person, more suspicious than excited. Between money requests, a gold bracelet, and an itemised bill for picking me up at the airport, I nearly booked a flight back to Auckland. One simple test, asking for my money back, changed everything I thought about her.
At 39, an Australian who considered himself a seasoned Thailand traveller met a girl over a game of pool in a Pattaya bar. Ten perfect days, a golf tournament in Indonesia, visits to her family in Isaan. All good until six months of distance for work uncovered that the Scottish boyfriend she said she'd left had never actually gone anywhere.
A 41-year-old British man went in two weeks from a Soi 4 fling to talking dowry and house renovations. He almost sent 400,000 baht. He did not.
A Canadian sailor has been married nine years to a woman from Pattaya and has three kids. Now he faces the hardest question of his life: stay or leave.