Not all Thai-Farang Marriages do end up like the Cinderella Fairytale.

A Word of Advice for Those Thais thinking of Marrying a Foreigner There has been several reports from Mr Niyom Watthamawuthi, Director in charge of the Thai Embassy overseas for the Health and Welfare of Thai citizens who are residents overseas.

According to the reports there has been an increase in Thai women marrying foreign citizens. These women hold the belief and hope that once they are married to a foreigner, their life will be happier and more fulfilled. Besides, they will benefit financially, but contrary to that belief, not all Thai vs Foreigner marriages end up like that Cinderella Story. The report also suggested that most Thai women who are married to a foreigner and have given up home in Thailand, emigrated to join their partners in their chosen home will soon find that they are being taken advantage of in area such as doing the household chore, working like a slave in their marital home in order to satisfy their husbands, or their elderly parents. The money that their partners had promised to give them had all been forgotten about. In some worse case scenarios, the husbands become fed up with their Thai wives and abandon them. This was due to their inability to communicate and also the differences in culture also pose another problem to their marriage life. Such incidence occurs frequently among Thais marrying to Swedish nationals, one of the most popular countries Thais are married to.

According to Mr Niyom, the reasons why many Thais chose to marry Swedish nationals was because there was a Swedish national who resided in Thailand, had set up an Introduction Agency business to allow Thais who wish to find their ideal partners. The conditions being that they must register their details on the company’s website and pay the fees of 3,000-3,500 Baht. These applicants must also pay another fees which is 3,000-3,500 Baht should they receive an email from an interested party. According to the report, there are approximately 2000 Thais who have uprooted and emigrated to set up their new lives in Sweden during the year 2003. About 80 per cent of these applicants were women who have met their potential partners who made their holiday in Thailand. According to the Director in charge of the Health and Welfare of Thais overseas, at the Thai Embassy in Stockholm, he had received many telephone calls from many Thai women ringing in to tell the Embassy similar problems about them being mistreated, sometimes like slaves, or in the worst cases they have been abandoned by their husbands for several weeks on end. Many women who could not stand the treatments of their husbands’ bad behavior even left home to seek a temporary shelter and assistance from The Women and Children’s Institute.

According to the Department of Health and Welfare for women and children out of the 22 of these places in Sweden, they have handled and given assistance to women who had been such similar conditions in the past two years.

What is worse is the fact that many women have actually been brought into the country by the same man.

The majority of Thai women who marry a foreign national come from the eastern part of Thailand as they have limited level of education and above all they do not possess the ability to be able to communicate in English. They rely largely on their husbands as the main bread winner. When they are abandoned by their husbands, they are faced with the need to defend for themselves. A word of warning to our readers then that not all Thai-Farang marriages do actually end up like that of a Cinderella FairyTale!