Well, at least you admitted you were snooping, which is good.
Don’t let this experience break your self-esteem, there are a lot of assholes out there but the nice ones make up for it.
Take it easy and focus on college - find a hobby or focus thoroughly on a current one to take your mind off it. It’s like quitting smoking; got a craving? Take a walk. Chew gum. Paint a picture.
Good luck!
While sympathetic to any anguish of the OP, I’m seeing a few disparaging remarks made about Thai prostitutes, and I’d like to say a few words in their defense.
I don’t shop for their services, but I certainly do know some of them. They’re always up for a chat between customers in the bars, and I’m out in the bars a few times a month. I’ll tell you, if I were young and single again – no, scratch that, if I were just single again, I’d be out there seeing them myself, too, what with their beautiful smiles and sweet personalities. Those looking down on them simply don’t understand it’s a completely different scene from in the West, and I mean a completely different world. Almost wholesome in some ways. I have friends who do patronize them routinely. They like to quote Charlie Sheen’s line from the Heidi Fleiss trial: “I don’t pay women for sex; I pay them to leave in the morning.” These are nice girls, very fun to talk to. Many of the ones I know have built houses for their parents upcountry. Most are raising children upcountry. There’s never any pressure if you really don’t want their services.
My Thai wife is quite fine with them, too. She’s interviewed many in the course of her work. Without going into too much detail, I will say that she works in the fields of Population Studies and Biostatistics. Much of her work has been published in both Thai- and English-language professional journals. She’s gone out to the bars with me on occasion. She’s seen the live lesbian shows. She’s even held the balloon over her head while a bargirl shoots it out of her hand with a dart fired from the vagina, just like the rest of us have. She knows these are basically decent girls who have chosen for whatever reason to enter this profession, where they can make much more money than they can working 12 hours a day in a sweatshop for $3 a day, IF they’re lucky. These are not Western-style hookers, these are not drug addicts or petty criminals or worse. Occasionally you DO run into a speed freak, but that sort of girl just brings trouble to the bar and so is fired before too long at all. People who look down on them are judging them by the standards of where they come from, with no knowledge of the cultural differences that exist that make this sort of activity acceptable.
Quite a few hookers here hope for marriage with a Westerner. Quite honestly, those marriages almost never work out, because it’s just TOO much of a mismatch for that serious of a relationship – often each one can only speak a few words of the other’s language! – but I do know a couple of these marriages that have worked out and more power to them when they do, I say.
Whatever you may think of prostitution, prostitutes and the men who patronize them, please try to bear in mind that likening the scene where you are to the one that exists here is simply comparing apples and and oranges.
I’m pretty liberal about prostitution myself, as long as the woman in question is working voluntarily. However, in the few times I’ve been to sex shows in Thailand, I saw a lot of very young girls - Thai women are often diminuitive but even so I suspect some of these girls were as young as 14-15. When they weren’t on stage they were sitting around the bars wearing numbers. And one could order off the barman: “I’ll have no. 34 please”. I found it extremely troubling, and I am sure that at least some of them were there through coercion.
I don’t believe for a minute that you saw an underage girl in any bar. The girls’ all have IDs, and the police come and check them periodically. 18 is the minimum age to work in a bar. A lot of Thai girls look very young, but when you see their ID, they’re in their 20s or even 30s.
I have never seen a Thai girl working in a bar against her will. Period. They are free to leave anytime they want. Period.
Plus any bar caught with an underage girl gets a mandatory closure. 30 days for the first offense. Longer the second time. Permanent the third. No bar owner with any sense is going to risk that. The Western media like to sensationalize Thailand’s naughty nightlife, but if they reported it as is, it would make for some very humdrum reading. Exciting enough I guess if you’re not familiar with it, but far from how it gets sensationalized.
While the minimum age for a girl to work in a bar is 18, oddly the minimum age for a girl to be a customer in a bar is 20 (male customers can be 18). So you have the weird situation where a girl of 18 or 19 can work in a bar in one of the bar areas, but she cannot visit any of the surrounding bars. A couple of years ago, Hog’s Breath Saloon in Nana Plaza got slapped with a 30-day shutdown right at the beginning of the high tourist season. Reason: A girl who worked in a nearby bar accompanied a customer into Hog’s Breath for a drink after leaving her bar together. The Hog’s Breath staff assumed she was in her 20s, but a Thai undercover cop who was inside discovered otherwise when he asked to see her ID. That was very painful for the bar.
Did you change your passwords yet?
Side note: The underage girls that you increasingly read about Western men being caught with do not come from the bars. They come from the street. In Cambodia, they might come from the bars. Not in Thailand. And thankfully, the local police are finally cracking down on harder on that sort of thing. More and more reports of Westerners with minors are seen in the newspapers.
Actually, Siam Sam, you’re probably right, so I withdraw my comment: the really young girls I saw were back in 1995, and I confess I haven’t seen any so young since. I suspect things have been cleaned up over the past few years.
I’m starting to feel the sick- what- have -I- done feeling in the pit of my stomach.
It’s true the police have cracked down harder in recent years, but I really doubt that even in 1995 would you have seen an underage girl. Today, impossible. 1995, doubtful. I’m thinking it was in the 1980s when I last personally saw someone I considered possibly underage in a bar. But then, I didn’t look at her ID.
There are many good practical advices offered already: Put it in perspective, Change your passwords, aim for a clean break, take care of yourself, fix your mind on other stuff and etc.
You can handle it. All fears we have in our life partly comes from the feeling that we cannot handle stuff. This is something that many, tens of thousands of people have handled before, and can move on. You can do, and emerge far better than now. You can handle the change.
Sure, you may have snooped through your boyfriend’s email. That’s a big thing, but you have owned up. Sure, two wrongs doesn’t make one right, but think about the issue in isolation. Your BF has done something that’s a dealbreaker for you - how different would it be if you found it out through another channels? It’s two separate issues. Don’t mix them up.
So, Finally back in contact. It sounds like he was completely scammed. Some thai guy pretends to be his friend, they go out to dinner, get a lot of drinks, then he says lets go to this place…bring your credit card. So it was supposed to be a happy ending type deal, but I suppose it turned out to be much more. So he winds up being charged for all 4 girls, for both him & his thai “friend”. He called me, super upset, apologizing profusely, claiming it would never ever happen again, and he would come home if we broke up. I believe him, and I’m sooooo torn.
I know things can seem so black & white on the internet, but real life is always a bit more tricky. I do believe that this was a one time transgression, and also believe that he did not go there with the intention of banging thai prostitutes. As to his bragging about it, totally immature male bravado. Then there is that tricky thing called love…I guess I do love him. So , I dont know. Part of me was feeling the taste of freedom, and part of me couldnt believe we wouldn’t be together anymore.
“Happy ending” - so you’re ok with him getting a hand job or blow job from a prostitute (not to mention being enough of a fool to believe some guy who’s trying to be “friends” with the Westerner-with-money), but blowing $700 for a threesome is your limit? Well, it’s your relationship. Here’s hoping that he’s not lying to you too.
Nothing that you cannot undo - not that I think that you should undo anything.
If you are worried about the family thing, then don’t, a friend of mine has long been divorced and his ex-wife left him for another guy (yes, with significant overlap). Even now, many years later, he is as close to her family as he is to his own - mind you, her family is very nice.
It would be a good idea not to badmouth him too much, breaking up as a couple does not (and in my book should not) stop one being friends. One simply ceases sharing a bed - well on a regular basis.
To be honest, if I were female, I would not let a guy wander around the Far East for two months - they tend to get lonely and a bit miserable. If it were you on a two month tour, you would probably have allowed yourself to get a bit drunk and fallen into the arms of a charming hulk from somewhere like the UK.
You could do worse than point him at this thread
“completely scammed” != “totally worth it”.
Ah the poor dupe, forced to have sex with two prostitutes for more than the market rate.
:dubious:
Honey, I’ve been in a brothel in Asia and was offered all sorts of services, yet had the wherewithall to turn it down. (We also got scammed by the way, and threatened by some big burly guys - for nothing.)
I am just wondering why does he feel the need to brag about being scammed.
Gotta wonder which is more pathetic – using prostitutes behind a girlfriend’s back, or getting scammed when trying to use prostitutes behind a girlfriend’s back.
There are lots of fine fellows out there who are not into this sort of thing. Why stay with one who is?
Get practical - put a stop on his credit card - they can reverse the transaction
Also tell him to get out - like now - if you stop the transaction he is dog’s meat.
They’ll know within 24 hours - possibly sooner.
If you want to feel kindly towards him, he was probably doped, a small trace of Ruthie in his beer would have him trotting along like a poodle.
To be honest, if you find $700 on his CC then he is almost certainly telling the truth.
Better advice - tell him to get out now - then stop the CC transaction, he can do it but will probably need help from you.
Forget about whether he did it or not, or paid too much.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s enough of a problem TELLING people he did that. I wouldn’t want to be married (or dating) my wife if she were the type of person who would tell people that she was screwing around on me.
Gee is it to much to ask for someone who tells their friends what a GREAT person I am? If you want to sound macho… find something else to brag about besides showing a total lack of respect for the person you’re with.
What a dick.
He is very young and very inexperienced - he got conned and is trying to put a brave face on it
If he was doped, about 90% likely, then few people would be able to handle it, unless they … just knew