One Year Later, Continued (Ex Shenanigans)

Okay, so I missed something very important out of my last post.  My ex-wife came to stay with me temporarily when Jik left last summer.  (I know what you're thinking, but the magic was gone.  I felt nothing but pity for my ex anymore.  If there were such a thing as a negative arousal state, my ex put me there.  Plus, my mom was there to referee.)

Before my ex came (my son came with her, by the way), Jik and I had talked about helping her--not because she deserved our help, but because we felt it was what was best for the kids.  We paid for her ticket, as well as tickets and enclosures for her pets.  Again, we felt this was the right thing to do.

My ex wasted no time trying to assert herself as maven in my household.  She regularly countermanded my mother--whom I'd left in charge in my absence during work hours, disregarded the way I had been providing structure for my children, and generally just acted entitled to our help.  She would initiate hostile conversations where she would talk to me as though I was not there.  She would allow our daughters to sleep in her bed at night (a habit I had worked hard to break them of).  I became the "bad guy" in my own house! 

A little back story: my ex-wife was the proverbial absentee parent.  She allowed our children to do whatever they wanted, provided they remained in the house.  She sat out back, drank $15 per bottle wine (on my dime), smoked cigarettes (also on my dime), and read low-rent romance novels.  She was my wife, and I was supportive as I could be, but I was frustrated by her apathetic approach to parenting.  She "checked out" of parenting a long time ago.  Parenting made her so stressed out she was suicidal at one point, so it was easier for her to just babysit our kids.  Of course, my house turned into a bit of a dump too, but that's another story. 

Back to the main story.  I had told my ex that she needed to find a job and her own place, and then get her head straight (she has a history of severe depression) if she wanted to be of any use to the children.  My mother and I helped her to get a job; I wrote her resume, and mom cashed in a favor. 

Jik came back two months later, and my ex moved out.  She (my ex) got an apartment and worked two jobs.  She did nothing, however, to try to deal with the issues that had plagued our marriage. 

The kids would spend time with my ex periodically, but they would invariably come back with stories of how their mother had slept during her time with them, and how she had left them to their own devices (much like she did at our old home).  They would also come back a bit reverted to their undisciplined selves of yore.  It was as though my ex was actively trying to undermine me every time the kids went to stay with her. 

Every thing I did or said that might possibly affect the kids was subject to her examination.  It was somewhat ironic that she who found so little time to parent during the twilight years of our marriage, now found the time to criticize my wife (then fiancée) and me for every detail, no matter how minute, inconsequential, or irrelevant.  My daughters saw fit to give their mother a tour of our home, after which, my ex greatly insulted our sons (my wife's from her first marriage).  "Those boys will not be sharing a room with my daughters." she demanded, knowing only what she had gleaned from talking to my 9 year-old daughter.  Of course, such a statement implies that there is something wrong with my stepsons, and Jik reacted accordingly.  It was all I could do to keep my wife from bitch-slapping my ex-wife!  Of course, I was not happy either, but I did not want my wife to have any issues, and I figured a criminal record would delay our immigration process!

In truth, losing my job as an air traffic controller was probably one of the best things that could happen to my children, since I could get them away from their mother for a while.  It should, in theory, also be good for her, so she can use the time to get the help she so desperately needs (as of the time of this writing, she has done nothing of the sort, however; she has, in fact, used the time to do everything but seek professional help).  Of course, this is no longer my fight, but she's mistaken if she thinks she'll play a big part in the kids' lives while her head is still screwed up.  Children need stability, love, and structure, not randomness and apathy. 

One Year Later

Well here we are, one year later, and Jikky and I are still going quite strong.  I can't say it's been all roses and puppies, but we can definitely say we've put our relationship through the ringer!

When last I wrote, Jik and I were in the lovely (ahem) little hamlet of Bethel, Alaska.  I was working as an air traffic controller.  Jik was taking care of three of our five kids (the other two were still in Bangkok with Jik's mom).

In September of 2015, I had a bit of a "deal" at work.  According to my coworkers, I put two planes too close together.  Given the environment I'd come from before, I was comfortable with the distance between my planes, but I guess that's neither here nor there; in short, by my coworkers' perception, I screwed up.  I was suspended from work pending an internal investigation.  It came out that I had been stressed to the max because of the fallout from my first marriage--I had lost my house, my car, and almost all of my belongings.  The stress of the divorce and dissolution of my old life had changed me.  I had lost my confidence, and my work had suffered accordingly.  Couple that with a rather toxic environment (and one in which I never fit), and it was a recipe for disaster for me.  I digress.  I went into counseling, and Jik and I started to guard our money resources carefully.  Jik helped me to plan our finances and manage our household.  We stretched the money out as long as we could, but eventually, we had to leave Bethel and relocate to California to stay with my family.

The move was hard on the kids, but Jikky took it in stride--even though she was sad to leave Bethel.  If there were ever a good reason to end our relationship (from her perspective), it was this.  My life had fallen apart: I had no home, no job, no car, and no prospects.  I had hit near rock bottom.  Through it all though, Jik buoyed me up; she helped me to regain my confidence, and loved me and our three kids (mine from my first marriage) with reckless abandon.  Thanks to my father, with whom I'd had a rocky relationship for much of my adult life, we at least had a place to stay.  Thanks to my mother, we had a car to use.

We got our daughters enrolled in school at the local elementary (which had improved markedly since my childhood), our teenager enrolled in online school, and daddy (that'd be me) on the job hunt.

Since I'd received a letter from the FAA indicating that I could no longer attain a fight physical based upon the perception of fraud (um...I hadn't talked to my physician about my anxiety and depression when I renewed my flight physical), I could no longer perform ATC services.  This meant I had to go back into IT -- a job field I'd had mixed success in several years prior (in addition to being the field in which I hold both B.S. and M.S. degrees).  I knew it would be a tough sell, but Jikky was in my corner from the outset.  She encouraged me, helped me to prepare for interviews, and reassured me after my numerous interview failures.  "You'll get it when it's the right job, hon." she'd say, "If you didn't get the job, it was probably not a good fit anyway."

In January of this year, my divorce from my first wife was finally completed.  I had primary physical custody and decision-making authority of our three kids, and my first wife was now, thankfully, my ex-wife.  We could finally make official the relationship that we'd lived for most of the last year.  We began to make plans to wed in February, so that we could adjust her status and begin to petition for our boys to come home too.

Then disaster struck.  Jikky found out that her ex-husband had been coaching her sons to go to court and testify that they wanted to live with him and his bimbo girlfriend instead of with us and their siblings.  He had been preparing to go to court and sue Jik for full custody of the boys while she was in the USA with me.  I immediately knew this meant she'd be leaving before we could adjust status.  We talked about it, but ultimately we decided she needed to go back.  It ended up being good anyway, since Jik had not seen her sons in six months; she needed to hug them, kiss them, and smell their scents.  We did, however, accelerate our wedding plans.  On 6 February of this year, the most beautiful woman I've ever known said "yes" to me in front of a minister, in the pretty little park off of the highway in Hercules, California, and made me the happiest man in the world again.

My Story; Her Story

I've always considered myself a good, family-oriented man.  I had a wife who gave me three beautiful kids, and 15 years of marriage.  The only problem, for the family perspective, was the job--which kept me away from aforementioned wife and kids; in short, I was working overseas in Afghanistan.  The money was good, but the job and the lifestyle sucked.  I hated being away from my loved ones--especially my three children.  It was torture for me to spend every day without my family, but I was building a future for my wife and myself, and a life for my children...or so I thought.

On 4 April 2014, my the wife of almost 15 years informed me of her desire to split up, blind-siding me completely.  Of course, divorce has never been a word in my playbook, so I was devastated.  She had her reasons, most of which I am not at liberty to discuss, but none of them were anything I had done.  Rather, I was simply not the right kind of man for her.  I was, in her words, "The Perfect Husband."  I didn't feel very perfect at the time; I just felt hurt and confused. 

Needless to say, I ran home as quickly as I could, throwing all caution to the wind--a decision that would ultimately devastate my finances. 

I was home for six weeks, and during that time, my ex tried to convince me that all I needed to do was have sex with another woman, and I would see that I no longer needed her.  In fact, she tried to convince me that I didn't need a real relationship, that random sex with anonymous partners was all I needed to feel fulfilled.  Since my ex was the only woman I'd ever been with sexually, her thought was that a taste of some "strange" would fulfill me.  I grudgingly went along with this idea, and went so far as to say that we could have an "open" marriage.  I did not want to leave my wife, at any cost--not at that point, at any rate.  I opened up accounts at several "hookup" sites, and began chatting with whomever would talk to me.  Nothing substantive came of this, but I did meet a 26-year old Russian (whom I remain convinced was a fraud).  Nevertheless, the fake Russian opened my mind to the prospect of international dating, but back to this in a couple of paragraphs.

I have to say that the divorce process (which is still, unfortunately, ongoing) was difficult for me.  The hardest part, but the part that would ultimately help me to let go, was having my ex-wife tell me that it was all fake.  She never loved me the way I loved her, and that she had taken something she should never have had (me).  Yes, there was another man involved.  Yes, I felt betrayed.  However, it was the fact that I could not even claim any good memories with her (besides the births of my children) that really forced me to let go.  Everything was fake!  I mean really.  How do you come back from that?  How do you reconcile that?  Yeah, it was because of that I realized that my marriage was indeed over, if it was ever really a marriage. 

As I mentioned a few paragraphs above, I created profiles on hookup sites.  After about ten days, I realized that not only was this a gratuitous waste of money, it was also not me.  I was not, nor would I ever be, a "nail and bail" kind of guy, but I did learn something from this process.  I learned that I was not particularly interested in dating American women.  Consequently, I created profiles on international dating sites.  Right away, I met a real Russian woman.  She and I seemed to hit it off, and we talked for nearly four months.  After a while, I realized that she was not, nor would she ever be in love with me, and that I was just a means to an end with her, so I ended our communication and cut her off.  I also became depressed and disappointed, and I began to delete my dating profiles.  I gave up.  That is, until I got an email that would change my life.

Jikky's story is a bit different than mine.  She had been married for nearly ten years when her husband asked for a divorce, and legally married for only about half of that time. 

Jik and her husband had had their share of ups and downs, but there were some definite problems that contributed to their demise as a married couple.  He had a son from a previous marriage, and anything Jik did to help him parent that child was perceived as aggression towards said child.  Additionally, both him and his parents did all they could to thwart or undermine Jik's efforts regarding setting her ex's son on the right path.  This caused a great deal of tension in their marriage. 

Of course, Jik says her marriage to her ex started on the wrong foot anyway.  They were dating and she became pregnant.  Right away, he insinuated that she should terminate the pregnancy.  Jikky, being the woman of strong character and lover of life that she is, told him she would raise her child by herself, and that she did not need him to do so.  They agreed to stay together, but I think this caused bad blood between them in a very early stage in their marriage, and I don't think they ever fully recovered from this. 

Jik's ex also had a penchant for hanging out with his friends, and disappearing for days on end ("making connections," he would say).  Although an exceedingly patient woman, this caused Jikky a great deal of anxiety.  She trusted her husband to do the right thing, but she was nevertheless worried that he might possibly get hurt, or worse, in Bangkok's notoriously gritty, hard streets. 

As the relationship began to deteriorate, Jik's ex would give her emotional difficulties and assert that things weren't working out because Jikky was "too cold," and that she never understood him sufficiently.  Jikky would respond by telling him that if she was too much, he could divorce her.  Of course, Jik's ex didn't rise to this challenge, so things continued like this for about five years, until Jik's ex finally asked her for a divorce, which she gladly granted.  (She later found out that her cad husband had been having an affair with a woman 17 years his junior for nearly five years!)

Jikky had a few friendly dates, and even had a crush on a pretty nice guy, but did not find what she was looking for.  She created a profile on a dating website for Thais, and fished around for a few weeks, until she ran across a profile that interested her.  She saw a confident-looking man in an Indiana Jones hat wearing sunglasses, and even though she did not initially find him very attractive, he seemed interesting.  So, she sent him an email:

"Hello, my name is Jikky.  Write me back if you want to know more."

I received that email, and I did indeed write her back, but that's a story for another post.

International Love

The purpose of this blog is as a venue for sharing stories for those of us who've given up on the traditional dating scene (whatever the reason) and sought love online.  If successful, the idea is that international and internet love success stories can be shared on this blog page. 

Although the embers of thought that constituted this idea have been swimming around in my head for quite some time, I owe its ultimate conception to an epiphany I shared with my fiancée while we were standing in the frozen section at the local grocery store.  My fiancée is Thai, and we live in a very small, isolated community in Alaska.  Needless to say, there aren't a lot of Thai people here in the community of 6,000 or so where we make our home, so when we met another Thai lady, Jikky (my aforementioned fiancée) and she rather quickly became friends.  It wasn't long thereafter that the two ladies shared their "farang" (Thai for "foreign") dating stories, and--lo and behold--noticed quite a few parallels. We thought, "We didn't think we were the only ones!".

In this day and age there is a lot of cynicism regarding meeting and dating people on the internet.  Really, there is a lot of cynicism about dating in general (I read an Onion article recently entitled, "Young Man Miraculously Finds Soulmate at Corner Convenience Store"), but internet dating seems to inhabit a particular region of the brain reserved for those ideas we regards with the heaviest skepticism.  It's strange that we regard the idea of a soulmate (or someone with whom compatibility is so high that the relationship requires very little maintenance) seems an idea worthy of our derision.  After all, is not the purpose of finding love something more than simply finding someone whom we find attractive and with whom we can share our genes?  If that's all love and relationships boil down to, then why bother?  But I digress. 

If you subscribe to my theories regarding love, then you have to understand the astronomical odds of finding someone with whom one would be highly compatible--a soulmate partner.  I did the math (found here) and found that the odds of finding one of the 871 or so people with whom one would be most compatible are .000000124, or about 124 per billion--that's a lower number than the concentration of most industrial chemicals allowed in drinking water.  It's a sickeningly low--and frankly, discouraging--number.  So, simply put, I thought the only way I could find this person was if she were looking for me, and looking for me in a similar manner to the way I was searching for her.  Corollary to this idea, I figured if I wanted to catch the the "fish" of a lifetime, I'd better cast a pretty wide net (ergo the name of this blog), and there is no wider net than the internet. 

The crux of this blog is so that Jikky and I, our friend and her husband, and people like us can share their internet dating success stories.  There's a lot of bad stuff on the internet, a lot of bad people, deviants, and criminals that are simply looking to exploit the lovelorn for their own personal gain.  Not everything out there is bad though, and I believe that if you filter through all of the trash, some true gems are out there to be found. 

Share your story with me as a comment, and in a few days I will add mine.