On a pavement in Bangkok, I stopped beside my suitcase to look at my phone. I had activated a SIM card, opened the dating apps and bought some snacks. Now there were more than ten matches on the screen.
That had never happened to me before.
I had travelled a long way carrying the feeling that I was not someone people chose. Suddenly, I had attention. Over the next few days, more arrived. I wanted it to mean that something important had changed.
Something had changed: where I was, and who I was meeting. What had not changed was my ability to judge a relationship. I did not understand that distinction then.
The relationship that followed lasted four years. Over that time, I lost more than EUR 150,000.
I am Mélih. This is my account of what happened, and why I created Before Further. I am telling it because the question I needed was smaller than the one I kept trying to answer.
I wanted to know whether this was the relationship I had been waiting for. I needed to ask what was clear enough to justify the next commitment.
What I brought with me
I grew up in France. I was curious, serious about the things that interested me, and drawn to understanding how they worked. Relationships were the part of life I found harder to understand.
There were crushes at school and university, but nothing that became the life I imagined. After I started working, I tried dating apps. Each disappointment seemed to confirm something I already feared. I was losing some hair; I began to think that I simply was not what anyone wanted.
That was a conclusion I drew about myself, not something those encounters established. But it shaped what I went looking for next.
I began reading about dating abroad. I booked a two-week trip to the United States six months ahead, then COVID disrupted it. During lockdown, work moved home and my world became smaller. Being single felt heavier without the ordinary distractions of going out.
After another lockdown, I negotiated to continue working remotely and eventually made the trip. I had given it a great deal of importance. The connections I hoped for did not happen.
I went back online. On Reddit, I found men whose experiences sounded familiar, including some living in Asia. I asked questions and listened. It helped to discover that other people understood the discouragement I was trying to describe.
Then I went to Bangkok.
That is the background to the phone on the pavement. The matches mattered to me because of everything I thought their absence had meant before. I was not just pleased to meet people. I was relieved to feel wanted.
Helping, then proving
One woman stood out. She asked questions, and we spoke more often. I suggested a rooftop bar for our first meeting. She accepted.
I was nervous about whether the person in front of me would match the photographs and our conversations. The evening went better than I expected. She was attentive and curious. I relaxed.
We continued the relationship at a distance. At first, I sent small amounts of money to help. I thought of those payments as a choice I was making freely. Gradually, requests became regular, and helping began to feel expected.
My reason for paying changed with it. I still wanted to be generous. I was also frightened that saying no would cost me the relationship.
When her phone broke, our regular video calls stopped. Buying a new smartphone appeared to be the way to keep the connection going.
Then came a family medical emergency. There were blurred hospital photographs, pictures of medication, tearful voice messages in the early hours and an urgent request for money. I cared about what I was being told. I also had very little room, emotionally, to consider what those messages did and did not establish.
A small-business plan offered a different kind of reassurance. I paid for stock and a deposit because the business was presented as a step towards independence and our future together. More problems followed, with more requests for money. I never saw a photograph of it open.
If I questioned a request or delayed a payment, messages could remain unread for two days. I would panic, apologise and send the money. Sometimes my questions were met with accusations that I did not understand family obligations. Sometimes another man’s attention entered the conversation, and I felt I had to prove that I deserved my place.
I do not know everything that was happening on the other side of those messages. The hospital photographs did not establish the bill or how much I needed to contribute. Not seeing the business open did not establish everything about what happened to it. Silence left me guessing at someone else’s thoughts.
I do know what happened on my side. I made another commitment while the explanation for the previous one remained unresolved.
The decision I kept avoiding
Looking back, I would like there to be one unmistakable turning point. There was not. There were questions I stopped asking, payments I explained away and concerns I postponed until the next reassuring conversation.
Perhaps the emergency was genuine. Perhaps the business would work. Perhaps I was being unfair. I could find a reason to give almost every uncertainty more time, while continuing to give it more money.
Two different decisions had become tangled together: whether I cared about her, and whether I should agree to this particular request. I treated the second as a test of the first. Asking about an amount or a deadline felt less like discussing a practical decision and more like putting the relationship at risk.
That was a difficult place from which to think clearly. I was asking each payment to do more than pay for a phone, a bill or stock. I wanted it to preserve our connection and bring us closer to the future I imagined.
Sending money could settle the immediate conversation without settling the underlying question. I mistook that temporary relief for progress. Then the next request arrived, and the unresolved parts of the previous one became harder to bring up.
As the commitments grew, so did the cost of admitting how little I had established. I would have to look at the new request, but also at all the earlier decisions I had defended. It was easier to hope that the next payment would finally make sense of them.
Shame kept the situation private. I did not want to explain it to someone else. Saying it aloud would expose gaps I could still soften when I was thinking about them alone.
Four years and more than EUR 150,000 are the scale of what I lost. They do not give me a complete account of her intentions. They do tell me how long I continued making decisions under uncertainty, and how far I went beyond my own limits.
Another person could hear what I was leaving out
What helped was talking to people who had lived through something similar. I spent days and nights reading, asking questions and considering what I had missed.
I did not need mockery. I did not need a theory about every woman or every international relationship. I needed to look at my particular situation without arranging every detail around the outcome I wanted.
I began thinking more carefully about reciprocity, boundaries and the difference between an explanation that reassured me and something I could actually establish. I also had to examine what attention had meant to me. I had allowed relief from loneliness to stand in for knowledge of a person.
I wish I had put three things on paper much earlier: what I knew, what I had been told, and what I hoped was true. In my head, they had become one story. Written separately, they would at least have been three different things to examine.
The most useful change was not learning to be certain about someone. It was realising that I did not need certainty about the whole relationship to set a limit on the next decision. I could care, remain unsure and still pause a payment. I could ask for another perspective before I knew how the story would end.
Why I created Before Further
Today, I live in Thailand. I am married and have a family. I keep their identifying details private.
My present life is not evidence that a particular place produces better relationships. Neither my happiness now nor what happened before tells me whether another person is honest. Nationality is not a substitute for knowing someone.
What I kept from those years was a practical question: what needs to become clear before I commit more?
That is the starting point for Before Further. A money request, recurring support or a non-refundable trip is a specific decision, even when it sits inside a complicated relationship. It has an amount, a deadline, consequences and unanswered questions. Those deserve attention of their own.
My experience explains why I care about that work. It is not a professional qualification, evidence of client results or proof that a service will produce a particular outcome. Before Further is about organising a decision, not claiming to read another person’s mind.
I created it around the pause I wish I had taken while the next step was still mine to choose.
Put the next commitment on paper
If you recognise something of yourself here, you do not have to settle what an entire relationship means before looking at the decision in front of you. Start with these seven questions:
- What exactly am I being asked to commit? Write the amount, date and purpose, or the trip and its non-refundable costs. Keep it specific enough to decide on its own.
- What do I know, and what have I only been told? Separate what you have established from explanations and hopes. An unanswered question belongs on the page too.
- What remains unclear from earlier commitments? Note what was agreed, what happened afterwards and what you are still waiting to understand.
- What would I need to establish before agreeing? Name the missing information. More reassurance is not necessarily an answer to the question you have.
- What is my limit? Include what you have already committed, not just the newest request. Write down the boundary before trying to negotiate it.
- Is there room for me to ask, wait or say no? Describe what actually happens when you do, rather than predicting what it must mean about the other person.
- Who can look at this without needing it to turn out the way I hope? Give that person the amounts, the timeline and the unresolved questions—not only the parts that make the relationship easier to defend.
Leave blanks where the answers are missing. Do not fill them with the future you want.
The question is not whether you can prove everything today. It is whether you have enough clarity for the commitment you are about to make.
For a shorter place to start, use the seven-question checklist. The Before Further method explains the decision-focused approach; the illustrative decision memo shows its format.