I apologize if I'm the one with Asian bias in this thread -- it's true that I sometimes talk about 'Thai' women and so on, in my experience there is more cultural homogeneity in Thailand, at least on things that are diverse in Canada (and talking about 'culture' always involves generalizations that don't apply to every individual) -- but it's partly because I've become sensitive to some of the extraordinarily peculiar things that get said about women from that country. A good example is the letter a couple up -- 'she's the first woman I've met who's not desperate to leave Thailand'. That's a very strange statement, and indicative of where the poster has been spending his time.
It's true that there are a lot of marriage norms in Thailand that make this kind of thing easy -- short courtship, dowry, and the peculiar human trait of falling in love based on what we imagine someone to be like. I remember one time my wife brought me a letter in English to translate, the first letter written by a German man to a Thai woman he'd met on the Internet (who spoke neither English nor German) -- it was discussing marriage, and I asked the woman what she thought of the idea. "Maybe I love him," she said. Is this universal? Of course not -- but people who roll that way will find the Internet is a powerful ally. Most of us can't even define love in our own culture, much less a foreign one, and it's always good to ask oneself why, for example, a professional woman with status and a career is interested in marrying a man she's never met, and moving to a country she's never been to. Or vice versa, Western men do the same thing in Thailand; it usually turns out to involve some degree of fantasy on both sides. In my experience, the fantasies of Thai women are more rooted in reality (involving money, or finding a husband in a culture that values youth) than foreigners (who have fantasies of submission, rescue, and 'she's a traditional knows-how-to-be-a-woman woman, not a divorce-planning Western-bitch').
And a problem we won't even get into is the Westerner who spends time in Thailand and thinks he knows everything about the place, what an asshole that guy can be . . . :'( I knew a man, just off a divorce, who met a woman (she was 30, he was 55) who spoke no English (still doesn't); and married her in a week. Compared to this dude, you are practically ordaining as a monk. 15 years later they still look happy, two kids and a house in Vegas . . . Sometimes everyone's fantasy lines up right, and studies show that arranged marriages don't fail any faster than our Western variety -- just make sure you know who's doing the arranging, and what's behind it, and try to have a second fantasy to replace the first one with, should it become unsustainable.
It's true that there are a lot of marriage norms in Thailand that make this kind of thing easy -- short courtship, dowry, and the peculiar human trait of falling in love based on what we imagine someone to be like. I remember one time my wife brought me a letter in English to translate, the first letter written by a German man to a Thai woman he'd met on the Internet (who spoke neither English nor German) -- it was discussing marriage, and I asked the woman what she thought of the idea. "Maybe I love him," she said. Is this universal? Of course not -- but people who roll that way will find the Internet is a powerful ally. Most of us can't even define love in our own culture, much less a foreign one, and it's always good to ask oneself why, for example, a professional woman with status and a career is interested in marrying a man she's never met, and moving to a country she's never been to. Or vice versa, Western men do the same thing in Thailand; it usually turns out to involve some degree of fantasy on both sides. In my experience, the fantasies of Thai women are more rooted in reality (involving money, or finding a husband in a culture that values youth) than foreigners (who have fantasies of submission, rescue, and 'she's a traditional knows-how-to-be-a-woman woman, not a divorce-planning Western-bitch').
And a problem we won't even get into is the Westerner who spends time in Thailand and thinks he knows everything about the place, what an asshole that guy can be . . . :'( I knew a man, just off a divorce, who met a woman (she was 30, he was 55) who spoke no English (still doesn't); and married her in a week. Compared to this dude, you are practically ordaining as a monk. 15 years later they still look happy, two kids and a house in Vegas . . . Sometimes everyone's fantasy lines up right, and studies show that arranged marriages don't fail any faster than our Western variety -- just make sure you know who's doing the arranging, and what's behind it, and try to have a second fantasy to replace the first one with, should it become unsustainable.
