Silent Partners

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  Siem Reap, Cambodia
Friday, February 22, 2008

If you spend enough time in Thailand, you're bound to see some pretty freaky things.  Like monks smoking cigarettes while talking on their cellphones, or two-year olds balanced precariously without helmets on the handlebars of motor bikes.  One of my personal favorites was a German-themed restaurant near the Night Bazaar in Chiang Mai, where the owner had decided to dress up his young Thai waitresses like St. Pauli girls from Bizarro-World as they served bratwurst and Heineken to hungry tourists.

In my eyes, however, none of these strange sights holds a candle to the unsettling phenomena of the farang-Thai couple.  They're everywhere, walking hand-in-hand down city streets, sitting in tuk-tuks, and canoodling on airplanes.  Typically, he's white, at least sixty years old, overweight, and badly dressed.  She's about thirty years his junior, petite, and attractive.

There are thousands of these couples in Thailand, and after a while, you just get used to seeing them.  Thinking about it, it's really a very efficient sort of relationship.  He gets to screw a woman young enough to be his daughter and doesn't have to worry about doing his own laundry or cooking his own meals.  She gets herself a genuine sugar daddy and simply has to tolerate the afore-mentioned screwing.  As an added bonus, she can sleep soundly knowing that one morning, in the not-too-distant future, he will be dead.

On a side note, some of my new Thai friends have told me that these women have little alternative.  Apparently, most Thai men prefer going out with light-skinned women - it's a sign of social status.  And despite the myriad of products on the market designed to lighten your complexion, many Thai women are dark-skinned - except, of course, for the children of biracial couples - making them unattractive to the local boys.  I note to myself that many of my pale American friends shell out about fifty bucks a month to sit in a tanning bed in order to improve their dating chances, but I think we're fresh out of irony at this point.

But....I digress...

I'm a liberated kind of guy and usually the last person to stick my nose in other people's business, but I have a very hard time accepting these relationships.  There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about them.  For starters, there's the language barrier.  He doesn't speak a word of Thai, and she barely understands English.  I only know how to say a few things in Thai - hello, how much, and thank you -  and while those phrases are probably enough for an entertaining evening in Bangkok, it's hardly the verbal dexterity necessary to sustain a long-term commitment.  I watch these couples sitting together at restaurants, and they just....sit there...without speaking a word.  In America, you usually have to be married at least a year or two before you get to this point.

It just seems pathetic that this is what it's come to, that communication is now an optional dating skill.  I look at this guy, bad comb-over and all, and feel sorry for him.

And then I realize that, after paying the check, this guy is going home for an evening of big-league bonking, then will put on some clean pajamas still warm from the dryer and enjoy a foot massage.  Meanwhile, I'm going back to my guesthouse, alone, where I'll end up watching the Transformers movie with Thai overdubbing.

And who's feeling sorry for whom, exactly?

I'm nearly forty years old, divorced, and have a string of unsuccessful relationships to my credit.  So who the hell am I to be doling out romantic advice?  I've always thought communication was important, but come to think of it, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single scenario in which opening my mouth actually helped me in a relationship.  On the other hand, I can recall hundreds of times when I said something incredibly stupid to a woman, only to immediately wish, "Gee, I really wish she didn't understand English."

So, perhaps Thailand is the new retirement mecca of the world for flabby Westerners.  If you're over sixty, have a moderate-sized bank account, and are single - or perhaps with just a very understanding wife - I'm guessing you could make a pretty good life for yourself here.  It's just as warm as it is in Florida, a hell of a lot prettier, and the cost of living is lower than anywhere in America outside of the Appalachians.

And then something else occurs to me.  Maybe these guys are on to something more profound than I gave them credit for.  Perhaps the real beauty of these arrangements, these quiet courtships, is the mystery that accompanies them.  Because in silence, anything is possible.  At the beginning of a relationship, there's a palpable sense of potential in the air.  This could be the woman of your dreams- intelligent, independent, and self-assured.  And he could be the man of yours- sensitive, confident, and funny.  Then, as they always do, they open their mouths and reveal to us their many imperfections.  And the longer we stay silent ourselves, they longer we can pretend that we're the people we'd like to be instead of the people we truly are - insecure, flawed, and human.

Maybe that's it.

But mostly, though, I imagine it's about the bonking.

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