# Thailand - Asian spinsterville



## Guest (Apr 6, 2010)

_"Thai social scientists have become increasingly worried that more and more Thai women are moving en masse into spinsterville. In 1998 a Mahidol University called Thai women the champions in Asian spinsterville, with almost 30% of them (aged 15-49) without a husband .../... (15 seems a bit young to marry, but Thai women in rural areas still marry in their teens). Nearly a decade later, in 2006, the National Statistics Office reported more residents of spinsterville, with 28.5% never married, and 6.4% having left the sanctity of marriage, that's 35% of Thai women of marriageable age unwed. The figure in the capital was even higher - a staggering 41.8%.

.../... Population-wise, the last count revealed one million more Thai women than men.

Thai women often complain that good Thai men are hard to come by - philandering, drinking, gambling and lack of responsibility are the usual accusations. This is unfair to good Thai men certainly, but that's the reputation they have to live with. Many Thai women are fed up with the Thai male's wandering tendency. So more of them are now turning their eye away from the home front to look for a mate. The trend of Thai women marrying foreign men has gone from strength to strength in the last 10 to 20 years; even pre-pubescent girls have been reported to say that they would prefer to marry a farang ("white foreigner") when they grow up - surely a screeching sound to the ears of the future Thai bachelors. 

Undoubtedly there must be a lot of single Thai men out there, even if there are one million fewer of them, and especially considering enough of them are hoarding multiple women .../..._

An extract from an interesting book by 'Kaewmala', much of which is more along the lines of Christopher G. Moore's 'Heart Talk', for anyone familiar with that excellent work. The few times she strays into statistical/factual information - such as the above - it's slightly less fluent. Nonetheless the above makes you think a little more about Thai farang relationships, both female-male and male-male...

Kaewmala's brief bio...

_Hi, my name is Kaewmala (not my real name).

I was born and grew up in northern Thailand. Went to school and university in Chiang Mai and spent ten years studying and working in the United States. I am now living in Bangkok with my husband. I’ve spent most of my adult life in a cross-cultural environment and enjoy sharing with people from different cultural backgrounds. I find that an enriching part of life experience which broadens and deepens my understanding of the world and people.

I work as an independent consultant in international development — the job takes me to many countries in Asia. While I enjoy my work which involves coming up with ways to support governments, NGOs and relevant agencies, to effectively help the poor, the disadvantaged and the downtrodden to help themselves, I try to find time to pursue my other passion — writing.

I started this website as a way to share with others, ideas, knowledge and understanding about love and romance and sexuality in Thai language and culture. I know it may seem odd that a Thai woman would want to talk about anything relating to sex, but then I’m not conventional._

The book is "Sex Talk - In Search of Love and Romance"

Published by Heaven Lake Press 2009 
ISBN 978-974-94788-3-7


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## Acid_Crow (May 11, 2009)

It isn't very strange, since so many 'marriages' is just a ceremony and no paperwork.


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## gino (Jul 20, 2009)

*?*

I fail to see how this would affect the results. With or without paperwork, wouldn't they still report themselves as married?


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## Acid_Crow (May 11, 2009)

ginocox said:


> I fail to see how this would affect the results. With or without paperwork, wouldn't they still report themselves as married?


No. With no paperwork there is no record on any database that they are married, and will then show up as 'single' or 'unmarried' in the statistics.


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## gino (Jul 20, 2009)

But aren’t you making some assumptions about the research methodology? 

If you take total birth certificates, subtract death certificates, divide by two, subtract total marriage licenses and add total divorce decrees you don’t necessarily arrive at the number of unmarried women. 

You would need very sophisticated Orwellian public recordkeeping to track everything that happens to everybody, which I don’t see happening in a largely agrarian society. 

Usually such studies are based on samples of the population. They interview a thousand people from various walks of life all over the country and generalize their findings to the overall population. There may be problems with the study design. If they only interviewed Bangkok residence or cell phone owners or college students, their sample may not represent other parts of the country. But we don’t know this from FB’s post.


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## Guest (Apr 7, 2010)

To give Kaewmala her due, reading on, she adds the following:


> _Going back to the high rates of unmarried Thai women, intriguing as they may be, the figures should be taken with a grain of salt. Though it is evident just from casual observation that there are more single Thai women now, there is reason to believe that not all legally single Thai women and men in Thailand are entirely husband-less or wife-less. Like in the West these days, more people are cohabiting. Fewer couples also bother to register their marriage for various reasons. Then there are women who can't register a marriage even if they want to because their husband has already got a legal wife - the national census doesn't include statistics for "minor wives."_


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## gino (Jul 20, 2009)

Is her study based on some sort of periodic census data?


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## Guest (Apr 7, 2010)

Fast forward to _Notes _at the end.

The 1998 poll was conducted by Mahidol University. The Population and Social Research Institute of the same university carried out a follow-up study in 2008, pubished in _Pujadkam Online_, June 19, 2008. The figures for 2006 were from the National Statistics Office.

No further details.


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