Living With Your Khmer Girlfriend

Also there will be all of her grey girl friends who will be phoning and wanting a blow by blow account, progress reports and information on potential problem areas – also be aware of the converse situation, that any problems that your girl runs into will be cast out onto the grey girl network for solution suggestions. If she has a grey friend who is living with, or has lived with, a barang then they will be the first port of call. Be sure to cultivate a friendship with any such a person, it will help in the long run as problems arise. Also, be sure to listen to the advice of your own friends who have Khmer wives, fiances or girlfriends, there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel all on your own.

Money

Ah, yes, this is a big one. The first, second and third things on any Khmer girls mind will be money. Having moved her in, your money will also be a source of constant worry for her. Every Dollar, Riel or Baht that you spend will be logged in the innate spreadsheet every Khmer girl has between her ears. If you do not think that your girl can recite your exact expenditure on anything for a given month, just try asking her sometime.

If you ever have an argument, you can guarantee that money will be the root cause, even if that fact is not readily apparent to you during the argument; for example, you might think that she is pissed off at you for rolling in at 4AM pissed out of your skull when you said at 7PM that you were popping out ‘for an hour or so’ – which would be the normal response and argument with the majority of Western women. HOWEVER, what she is really arguing about is the fact that you have blown US$30 in a single night on; beer, tips for back-massage girls and one slightly dodgy chicken kebab. That money to her represents a couple of week’s groceries, or a month’s rent for her mother in a wooden shack somewhere North of Phnom Penh.

One of the best long term defensive strategies for this is too only declare two-thirds of your actual income to said girl. Keep the rest carefully [and I mean carefully] hidden. When you go out for the night, leave all your cash at home except the one single, solitary, US$10 note that you tell her you are taking.

Once in your watering hole of choice, you can retrieve the large wad of rolled up twenties from between your butt cheeks and drink away to your hearts content. Alternatively, if you are on friendly terms with the barang barkeep at your local, you could do as I do, slip him US$50 or US$100 at the beginning of the month as bar credit and then just drink for free for the next few weeks – it saves hiding the cash somewhere at home.

Social Life

This is an area which also overlaps with Money, however, your idea of a good night out may not be the same as your girls. Sitting in a bar, having a few beers and chatting the evening away with friends in just not something that Khmers really do, or understand. If they go out for a sociable evening, it tends to be more purpose orientated:

– you go to a restaurant, you go to just eat, talking is often difficult, what with the ear-bleeding volume of karaoke singers and music.

– if you wish to carry on after that; you can go to a Khmer nightclub, where the music will again be played at a volume capable of causing internal haemorrhaging , you will carry on drinking and maybe have a bit of a dance

– or if your Khmer friends are not as hip as that, you will probably end up singing karaoke in a VIP Karaoke parlour, where the real purpose is really to get even drunker and fondle the girls

So the relaxed, casual, popping out for a beer or two with friends is alien ground for your average Khmer. Your grey girl will probably tire of accompanying you on such nights out, she will end up sitting on the same glass of coke for the whole evening, once you have her trained in the fact that it is rude to just sit at the bar for 3 or 4 hours and not order a drink of anything, ever. Depending on language skills, she may at first try and keep up with parts of the conversation, but she [and you] will quickly tire of attempting translations and explanations of every other; word, phrase or idiom used by a group of increasingly drunker ex-pats ? as she sits there with her warming coke.

Furthermore, your choice of venues becomes increasingly restricted with your [bored] grey girl in tow; any bars specifically orientated towards gentlemen are obviously out, as are the majority of ex-pat or tourist bars, as every NGO women with a 4×4 Toyota Land Cruiser will look at you like you are scum and will assume that your girl is a whore – which gets very, very, tiring very quickly.

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