Some of the pull is her and some is the setting: where you are, how far your money goes, how dating went at home. What 93 Thai commenters say, what the figures show, and how to tell which part is which.
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Some Western men prefer Asian women, including Thai women. If you are one of them, the attraction may be partly her and partly the setting: where you meet, what your money buys and how dating went at home. Ask which parts would last elsewhere. This page looks at Thai women, the case we have data on.
How many Western men marry Asian or Thai women?
The figures can’t say: they count marriages, not preferences, and the ones we checked cover US newlyweds and marriages registered in Thailand, not all Western men. In the United States, 17% of all newlyweds in 2015 married someone of a different race or ethnicity, up from 3% in 1967, the year the laws against mixed marriage were struck down; among White newlyweds it was 11% (12% of White men, 10% of White women), and that counts a spouse of any other group, not only an Asian woman 1. So roughly nine in ten White American newlyweds married within their own group.
In Thailand’s own registry, Thai women registered 8,822 marriages with foreign men in 2024, up from 7,658 in 2022, and British and American men were the two largest groups in every month we found from January 2023 to April 2025 2. Those are marriages with foreign men of every nationality, not only Western men, and there is no count of all Western husbands to set them against, so they show thousands of marriages a year, not a share of anyone.
These figures show who married whom, not whom men find attractive, and they can’t tell you how common the preference is across Western countries. The same Pew report shows that Asian American women married outside their racial or ethnic group more often than Asian American men: 36% against 21% of newlyweds in 2015 1. Those figures are about Asian Americans in the US in 2015, not about Thai women in Thailand, and they count every kind of intermarriage.
When a Western man does choose a Thai partner, his reasons can mix two things: something real about the women he has met, and the difference between those meetings and dating at home. Looks, warmth and good company are real, and so is the pleasure of being noticed somewhere new. Suppose you meet her on holiday, early in courtship, somewhere your money buys more than at home. All three conditions can affect how you experience the relationship, and they are easy to miss because they feel like her.
Marriage counts show who married whom in one country and year, not how many men prefer Asian women. The men who marry Thai women are not a type.
Why do foreigners like Thai women? What 93 Thai commenters say
In the Pantip comments we counted, more of the people who gave a reason put it in the man’s circumstances than in her. We read 11 threads on Pantip, a large public Thai web forum, from 2013 to 2021, that ask why foreign men go for Thai women, and counted the 93 people who answered, one entry each, coding only what each wrote. None of them writes as a Western man; 14 pass on what a husband, a boyfriend or a foreign friend told them. The short lines below are our translations from Thai.
- 62 of the 93 give a reason