LET’S FACE IT, of the few big issues almost guaranteed to have newspapers and magazines flying from the stands or being searched for on the Internet, relationships rates very high.
It has been this way for years, and the juggernaut that is the wealth – and in some cases the paucity – of information available does, it would appear, little to keep people in long-lasting relationships.
Divorce rates seem to be spiralling upwards year on year, and a vaguely cynical attitude of not expecting what seems to be a committed relationship to last is burgeoning.
Problems – and solutions, one must hasten to add – are as varied as there are people.
However, a certain few situations are bound to cause tensions within a relationship, be it a marriage or a civil partnership.
Unemployment, money problems, infidelity or suspicion of it, children or the lack of children, can exert an undeniable, yet often lurking pressure on even the strongest of couples.
Moving house, too, is often considered a major stressor.
By what factor, one may ask, is that stress amplified when the couple move – or meet – overseas?
Much, some would say too much, has been written about mixed relationships – especially in Phuket.
Very little, however, has been reported about the foreign couples living here.
Is it all plain sailing for you here if, for example, you share a mother tongue and a country of birth, and find yourselves meeting in or moving to “paradise”?
The answer would appear to be “no”, at least in some cases.
Nicole and Simon (not their real names) met in Phuket three years ago. Nicole is Scottish and Simon is from England. Both are in their early-fifties and both have had a number of long-term relationships.
Nicole speaks first saying, “I spent many years travelling the world as a diplomat’s wife, raising our children in places as diverse as Australia, Greece, Macau and France.
“I – whether a blessing or a curse, I’m not sure – have therefore experienced the difficulties, the stresses of being an expat wife abroad. Admittedly age, or rather generation more accurately, may have something to do with it, but I found it incredibly difficult to cope with the ‘us’ that we were in foreign countries.”
Nicole states that, as a young diplomat’s wife – “And that was exactly it; I was the wife and hardly worth noticing in my own right” – in the early 1970s, options for a fulfilling life overseas were limited.
“I have a degree, a good one in chemistry from St Andrew’s, but that was – pardon my French –bugger-all use abroad. Flower arranging and garden parties require little hands-on knowledge of analytical chemistry.
“Time moved on, my ex-husband’s career flourished before coming to an early end, and I found myself footloose and fancy free,” she says with a slightly wry smile.
“The Phuket of four years ago seemed like heaven after Macau,” she says.
Simon listens, nodding. His experience, he relates later, is almost that of Nicole’s ex-husband’s role, the successful man with wife in tow. He almost winces from time to time as he hears how isolated Nicole felt.
“Bliss, well close to it” is how Nicole describes her first couple of years on Phuket.
“I found the freedom to be me. However, that doesn’t mean that life was a bowl of cherries; far from it. It was my time to be me, but everyone else in Phuket is here because they, too, want to be themselves.
“A little hypocritical perhaps, but who is going notice me being me when they are too busy being themselves?”
Taking Simon’s hand, as if to reassure him, she continues, “In some ways it was easier when I was on my own. Being in the middle of a foreign culture, even with years of experience overseas, was hard.”
Meeting someone new, she says, made her consider what she wanted from a new relationship.
“I wondered if I was in a relationship because of loneliness or because I truly wanted to be with Simon. Doubts crept in. Still do sometimes, but not really about him, more, well, most of the other [foreign] men here,” she says, evidently choosing her words with care.
“It is difficult to avoid making the occasional comparison between yourself and the local women. After all, despite the protestations many [foreign] men make about being on Phuket for work and business opportunities, how many of them are interested in women from their own background?
“The reputation foreign men over here, like children in a toyshop some of them, does little for the confidence of a Western woman.”
Simon, now a hotelier, moved to Phuket with his English wife in 2002.
The relationship, he says, soon floundered.
“Simply wasn’t prepared for it,” he begins. “Our first time abroad to live. Never even had more than two weeks away together in our 20 years of marriage.”
Simon, who was involved in the cutthroat world of London advertising, said he and his wife gave it all up on a whim after a fortnight in Phuket.
“Big mistake,” he notes, adding, with a smile towards Nicole, “except, if my marriage hadn’t gone tits up, we wouldn’t be together now.”
The unpreparedness Simon referred to was a lack of reality.
“‘Paradise’, ‘heaven’, ‘Shangri-la’ shout the advertising slogans, but it isn’t really. Well, a bit of a fool’s paradise perhaps,” he begins. “We bought into it, literally, and while the – oh, don’t get me started on this one – ‘lifestyle’ is a buyable commodity, it’s intangible, nebulous and, ultimately, non-existent.”
Simon says that it is all too easy to watch minutes drift into hours, days into weeks and months into years.
“Torpor. That’s what they want to sell you, torpor masquerading as happiness. I was in advertising for 30 years, so I feel rather well-qualified to speak on the matter,” he says with a grin.
“My ex and I had, oh, a good 12 months of doing absolutely nothing before we started work on our hotel. Plan was to get down to it straight off, but one party led to another, a quick dip in the pool led to sitting by it all day, and before we knew it – bang! – a year gone.”
The ex-advertising man lights a cigar, sits back in the poolside chair and says, “We bought into the…” – he raises his hands, making the quotation-marks gesture with his first and second fingers – “dream, although I see it as more of a myth.
“My advice? Work here, don’t buy a lifestyle of sitting on your arse all day. More marriages – between foreigners – here end through idleness than through infidelity. Am sure of it.
“We’re not the New Raj, these aren’t the days of ‘White Mischief’ in Happy Valley [Kenya, not Hong Kong. Ed.], although some people aren’t far from it,” says Simon, guardedly.
Both Simon and Nicole agree that turning a getaway, a dream “destination” into a long-term base for a successful long-term-relationship is fraught with difficulties.
“Be realistic,” says Nicole.
“If you imagine that living on Phuket – or upping sticks and moving to any foreign country – will be easy, then you are sadly misguided. I was, we both were,” she continues.
I should have known better, but thought that I knew it all. It’s just as easy to drift apart abroad as it is at home, perhaps easier in some ways.
“When one is far away from home and, dare I say it, the watchful eye of family and society, in a very different culture, certain behaviours are tolerated more,” she continues.
“You can drink like a fish if you want, knock seven bells out of your children or wife or husband without anyone stopping you.
“No-one reproaches you, friends are hard to come by, and a good partner even more difficult,” she notes.

Alice (not her real name), a thirty-something mother of two, suggests, “We bubble wrap all our possessions, our bits and pieces when we move, but give almost no thought to our relationships.”
The slim Frenchwoman should know. Her marriage to her property-developer husband, also French, was on the rocks within months of arrival.
“I realised that the move was a mistake and wanted to go back to the Dordogne,” she says, “but we have two small children, and my husband’s career is here.”
“I don’t blame my husband – and we have repaired our marriage now, perhaps it is stronger than before, even. I don’t know – for the things that happened. The problems arose because of issues at home,” says Alice.
Worth noting is Alice’s use of the word “home”.
Phuket – or wherever one is living away from the place of one’s birth – never appears to be home. The house here in which one lives might be a home, but Phuket as home?
Few people seem to call it so. This possibly reinforces the often-transitory nature of relationships here. There is little of permanence. People pass through all the time. A new posting, a new opportunity and they are gone.
Longstanding friends are rare, and although this may suit some, many find themselves at first enjoying the new entrants into a social circle without realizing that others have left.
Alice continues, saying, “My mother, she died, and I felt guilty for not being there when my family needed me. There was I, enjoying life in Thailand making what seemed like excuses.
“The isolation, I suppose literally the alienation I and others I meet, especially women, from our usual environment makes me feel… culturally lost.”
Alice explains that the “cultural isolation” she, and, as she points out, her husband felt, made them turn – initially – even closer to one another.
“On the surface, that might look like the ideal thing to do and I think for a time it can work, can help.
“But we almost became dependant on each other.
My social circle was limited; Jean, my husband also found it difficult to make good friends. People would smile at his face while they held a knife behind their backs,” she says.
Jean speaks, saying, “And that drove us apart for a while. So many pressures on us, like daily living issues, the monsoon weather, the different ways of having to do things here plus leaving close friends behind were intensified.
“We didn’t know whether to split up or get out of Thailand and because no decision was made, we drifted apart.
They state that, once they had reconciled themselves to putting their children first – “I am sick of the ‘Me, me me attitude here,” says Jean – and realised that any further expatriation or repatriation would be too much of an upheaval, they found themselves in a happier, closer zone.
“If it is a short-term assignment overseas,” says Alice, “then people may justify putting up with the disadvantages and difficulties for a few years.
“Making the choice to stay for a long time means making peace with those disadvantages and difficulties. Over time, we – any couple or family living abroad, not only us – must become more aware of our reactions to the differences and the isolation and develop responses that are appropriate,” concludes Alice.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence around to suggest that more people than ever before are seeking to earn their livelihoods in a country other than the one in which they have grown up, and a stream of surveys from just the UK suggest that the majority of Britons would, if possible, live outside the UK.
Many newspapers – again especially in the United Kingdom – have “expat sections” with hints on where to move, how to move, how to buy a house and what to do, but little on how to make a relationship survive overseas.
For those who measure their time here in years rather than months, the stories from Simon and Nicole, and Alice and Jean may be too painfully familiar.

For Phuket’s neophyte couples, the watchwords must be never to make the assumption that paradise is always heaven.

It can be hell on relationships.