jaygee68

P11,with all due respect,actions that you may regard as "cultural differences" others may regard as outright pre-meditated,devious and dishonest behaviour by the F/F and her family.Until some agreement is reached on this point i fear the same fat is going to be chewed on over and over again by you and others on this thread.Maybe the truth could lie somewhere in between "cultural differences" and "outright and pre-meditated devious and dishonest behaviour" i suppose.

Mallory

Something does not add up. You are in receipt of a British State Pension and a full military pension. You are living somewhere that sounds very cheap. Do you have a credit card, if not why not? With your income it should be very easy to buy a ticket to the UK and outfit yourself for your son's wedding. Why would you put dealing with a scheming malicious woman in front of attending your son's wedding. It is not normal to put a trashy ex-girlfriend before your son's happiness. What is wrong with you?

Thairetired2016

As a foreigner you will have little chance to come out the winner of any court case. You will foot the bill whether you like it or not.
This is their "culture". Phils won't be any different to Thailand.

morpeth

It is asked because it just seems so strange your comments about only being the "last year" doesn't correspond with what you wrote as more than one person has brought up.

nonthaburi

It may be the norm, but that doesn't mean you have to fall for it every time.

abner

Errrm, no.

I've read the entire thread over the past few days.

There were certainly several incidents in the early days that attracted posts full of sympathies and humourous similar anecdotes, from other expats with Pinay wives and their extended families. I probably could have contributed a few myself, if I'd become involved in the thread at the time. (And I'd love to have a beer with Stokkevn in particular some time. But I digress.)

But from very early on there is an undeniable sense of a slow-motion train-wreck in progress; something well beyond "normal" cultural differences familiar to the thread contributors.

At first the LL's family seem to be the villains of the piece, always dissolute and grasping, but mostly in minor and transparent ways. But even in the face of that, you were already nearly immune from outside advice on how to mitigate that financial bleed with any kind of firm stance, and let it continue.

During this period, there are regular hints (which you certainly acknowledged receiving, though you dismissed them as gossip, or unprovable, or whatever) of far more profound issues below the surface with the LL, many of which proved all too true later on.

Shortly after the marriage, the dam breaks. The previous children came out, two sets of them. The lending business you never knew about failed (and may well have been a complete work of fiction from the get go). Other major debts came out, and then start proliferating. The knives and suicide threats came out. The mango thing happens. The father and the LL go into vapors at the hospitals, the LL repeatedly so. There's some strange and scarcely credible gynecological sub-plot, which if nothing else, is expensive. Oh, and there's the job in Big City, which probably never existed.

Every succeeding crisis calls for more money, and you frequently come up with a lot of it.

Once you *finally* get it in to your head to actually push back, the major legal threats start happening, just as everyone on the thread told you they would.

Yet to this day, you treat this past year's worth of massively negative developments with your LL as some sudden aberration after 3 years of comparative bliss, despite nearly every contributor to this thread calling the opposite, repeatedly, years in advance, even before the full extent of her perfidy came out. The issues involved were always lurking under the surface. Your in-laws must have known about many or most of them, and you chose to ignore the warnings you received about them from other parties, on BE or off..

* * *

So in the end, pretty much none of it was "due to the cultural differences which is quite the norm."

In reality, you've hooked up with a world-class grifter in your LL, one who has bled you nearly dry, and threatened you with serious legal jeopardy in your chosen retirement locale unless you continue to pay. You've finally, belatedly woken up to that--(well, maybe)--but seem absolutely blind to your own role as a world-class enabler of the abusive behaviour over the 4+ years of the thread.

Jerseygirl

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

P11 is not going to like the above post...but IMO it sums this whole thread/P11’s life in the Philippines up brilliantly.

Pulaski

Thank you, you've saved me reading 4,000+ posts

Feidlimid

Very succinctly put Abner. To expand on one of P11's regular claims that the first 3 or 4 years of his life where bliss, when challenged, his justification that he didn’t tell us about all the good stuff during that period (or words to that effect), simply beggars belief. From his own posts, we have all read how he was continually scammed from the very beginning. No amount of ‘good stuff’ (ok, apart from the water melon stuff maybe) could have happened during that period to balance out the constant scamming he faced from the very beginning to enable any reasonable person to describe that period as bliss. If P11’s on his usual form I expect he’ll ask me to explain where he was scammed …

I’ve always felt the whole thread has been a scam of sorts because in my heart of hearts, I find it difficult to comprehend that anyone as intelligent as P11 appears to be, could also be so totally daft when it comes to dealing with this woman. Yes P11, we know we don’t have to read the posts if we don't like it but we do because as I’ve said before, it’s entertaining, especially with the comments from other members.

I’ve also noticed that P11 has become more irate over the past 6 months or so and more so as those members who had a certain empathy for his plight have become more and more frustrated with his intransigence towards what is mostly common sense to practically everyone else. So once again P11, please try and move on with your life. What you’re doing right now is not moving on!

nonthaburi

Someone remind me, what was the mango thing mentioned a few posts back?

spouse of scouse

Dunno, I vaguely remember something about frogs and coconuts but my brain has obviously ejected any mention of a mango

morpeth

I agree it was a very good post aptly summarizing the history of this thread.

nonthaburi

It's okay . It's come back to me now. Something about surplus mango from harvest being resold I think.

Mallory

Very similar to the rice selling business.

Mallory

I dare you to binge read the whole thread.