It was more than just a trip, though, I was in the country because I was moving in with a guy I’d met face-to-face for the first time only a few hours previously.
But let me start at the beginning.
I was 20 years old when I met a guy in a Yahoo! game room (remember those?).
That place was rife with men looking for virtual hookups, but all I wanted to do was play some games.
Future Husband invited me to play and started explaining how it all worked when I didn’t know the shorthand, like when people kept asking me “asl” which meant “age, sex, location”.
Back then I was using the tag @DevilishJames (named after a hot water bottle cover that looked like a cute little devil) and he thought I was a guy at first.
But that was irrelevant, because he was there to play games too, not do all the other stuff.
We played and talked all night.
I walked away from our session buzzed, feeling like the universe had shifted on its axis.
He went up on the roof to smoke because he felt the same.
The next night, we met up to play games and talk again.
And the next and the next and the next.
We expanded our channels of communication and eventually got into video chats as we played.
This became our routine for the next two years, spending our evenings together and spending all day waiting until we could meet up again.
And because we didn’t have anything like World of Warcraft back then (we eventually started playing that together as well), we only had the simple games in Yahoo! like chess and snooker, we talked.
A lot.
We talked about big things and small things, important things and unimportant things.
We talked about life and stress and hopes and dreams. I think we both felt very alone with where we were in life and we connected over that.
When he started saying that he loved me, I insisted for months that it couldn’t possibly be true, because I couldn’t be loved (I had serious self-esteem issues rooted in childhood trauma).
But eventually, I gave in and let it be what it would be.
We started talking about him coming to my country to study, but his situation at home was very bad.
Eventually, I was the one who left my life behind, to fly across the world to marry a guy I’d only ever known online.
We had our first face-to-face meeting at the airport.
It doubled as our first date, which lasted for 7 hours because it was just another layover.
I hadn’t slept for 30 hours and had just gotten off a 10-hour flight so I was fresh af, but we had fun.
Nauseous as I felt from the not sleeping, the flying, the 7 hour layover in Bangkok, the meeting him for the first time.
During that whole trip, I panicked twice over what I was doing.
Once, when the first plane was taxiing, a jolt shot through me, “What the fuck am I doing? Let me off this plane!” but I took a breath and that thought got left behind as the plane took off.
The second time Future Husband’s friend was driving us from the airport when I sat in an overtired daze staring out the window.
The landscape of the city was so foreign, so alien, so different from what I was used to.
It was so hot and I was so tired.
The panic barrelled through me, “What the fuck have I just gotten myself into?” as I watched the city scrolling by my window, but I was too tired to really acknowledge it.
That was the start of one of the hardest times in my life, which included but was not limited to…
Converting so I could get married.
I followed in my grandfather’s footsteps in this, he joined the church to marry my much more religious grandmother, but neither of us did this with any conviction.
Diving in at the deep end into a culture much more patriarchal than my own and having to accept that the rights, opportunities and respect that I’d taken for granted as a woman looked completely different here.
For example, about six months into our marriage, concerned female family members started coming up to me and asking if I was barren, and I had several awkward conversations where I tried to explain that I just wasn’t grown up enough to take responsibility for another life.
Family planning was a completely foreign concept and the one time I went to a gynaecologist to renew my prescription for birth control pills, she essentially laughed me out of the office, saying that those were over the counter meds anyone could buy at any time — now I understand why it’s like that, but back then I was baffled.
Going from having lived alone since I was 16-years-old to living in a one bedroom house with my husband, his mother, two younger siblings and uncle.
It was the upper storey of a house, our very country landlord and wife lived downstairs.
We lived in a very poor neighbourhood.
We had one large converter, from which everyone siphoned power (it regularly broke because of this and black outs were normal), and we had one person in the neighbourhood who was subletting his internet connection to the rest of us.
The streets were old and narrow, and new houses went up willy-nilly.
The neighbours across the street started building a second storey to their house, ran out of bricks halfway through the bathroom walls so we all had to watch them use the facilities.
Three brothers once decided to build a house right behind ours (and by that I mean literally one hand’s breadth behind ours), where there was one storey per brother plus family.
The youngest child kept wandering the streets calling everyone mummy.
One Eid they kept their Eid goat on the unfinished roof.
The goat tried to join the neighbour’s herd down in the yard by jumping from the third storey, and broke a leg.
We’d spent the month listening to it crying all night long and when it finally made it to it’s friends, it had to be put down.
Being carted around like a show pony because I was the only white girl in town (despite it being a city of 10 million people), and certainly the only white girl to ever marry into the family.
One of our neighbours, a very nice young lady who was a school teacher in the country side, came to meet me and squeezed my arm to check if I was real, “Just like on the TV” was her verdict with eyes shining in wonder.
Whenever a school bus would pass by the car or rikshaw I was sitting in, the windows of the bus would fill with faces because the kids had never seen a white girl before.
And all that came at a time when finances were hard for us.
We had many days when we didn’t have money for food and went begging from the neighbours, to feed the younger siblings if nothing else.
I eventually strong-armed my husband into coming back home with me, so that he could go to school.
We were living so far below the poverty line that getting a degree was impossible.
No matter what we did or how hard we worked, we just weren’t making the kind of money we needed to even survive on a day-to-day basis.
I had joined the business in garment manufacturing my husband had started building at 19 when he decided he wanted to marry me, but because of some interpersonal drama, that all went belly-up. (Interpersonal drama drove a lot of the success or failure of things there, and we were in a complicated situation, but that’s a story for another day.)
And even though it meant leaving his family behind, in a bad situation, the only way forward was to leave.
He did it begrudgingly, but he came with me.
Coming back home started a whole new chapter, that included starting a business that got sued over a small debt and went bankrupt, got bought, and failed after an abysmal rebranding, but, that too, is a story for another time.
People often ask me if I regret going to live across the world in a culture that I knew nothing about.
And my answer is always the same: no.
It was beyond stressful to deal with so many factors that were new and unfamiliar on a daily basis, and though I don’t think I could ever be happy living there, I went with the intent of building a life and staying for good.
A lot went wrong while I was there and I didn’t handle many situations with a lot of grace.
It got ugly.
But I’m still a better person for it.
And I’ve been a better partner to my husband because of it.
Not only do I know what dealing with his family is like, I lived it, so I have an intrinsic cultural understanding of it.
I came back home with a new perspective on life and experienced reverse cultural shock, that disquieting sense that you don’t quite know or understand where you came from any more either.
My working theory has always been that we’ll be best off in a third country, not his or my origin country, because then we’ll find a balance that we won’t otherwise and that’s what we’re working on making a reality now.
What about you? Have you ever taken a trip that profoundly changed your perspective on life or the world?
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