Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing marriage and Marriage Visas here in the Kingdom of Thailand. For those who are unaware, about a week ago I did a video where I basically asked folks who are recent viewers of this channel basically what they would like me to talk about especially as we have kind of wound down the lockdown of Thailand, there's not really any major restrictions on people coming in and out of Thailand, and thank God we have sort of put that in the rear view mirror.

One person put a comment on that video and basically said "the pros and cons of marriage and Marriage Visa in Thailand", so that was sort of their question. Well I don't know if I really want to get into the pros and cons of marriage per se because I think there are different people that have different notions of the pros and cons of marriage. Me personally in my personal life I think marriage is a great institution. I personally think it can do a lot for people and I think it can do a lot for a couple in bringing them together and sharing a life more fulfilled by dint of the fact that they are married, so that's my personal opinion on the pros. As far as the cons, yeah I do understand, we do a lot of family law divorce happens, marital estates get divided and that's problematic. So of course, that's always out there. I don't think much more explanation is really needed on that.

Now when it comes to the issue of Marriage Visas, when I thought of making this video after reading that comment, I thought to myself, “I have really covered this” and then I have to remind myself from time to time, look you have been doing this for years. People are not just sitting around watching every single video that you make that comes out so you are going to probably have to repeat yourself from time to time. My opinion, and I have discussed this in other videos, in many ways Marriage Visas can be for lack of a better term, less straightforward to deal with than for example a Retirement Visa or even a Business Visa depending on whether or not you are work authorized in Thailand. The reason for this is, as we have discussed, years back there was kind of a spate of I guess you could call it, there was sort of a ring of folks that were issuing fraudulent Marriage Visas. They had somehow figured out a way of creating fraudulent marriages to Thai women who were otherwise in Thailand and they were unaware of this by the way; they did they did not know that they were on paper married to someone. Then that person who was on paper married to that Thai person, would get a Visa based on the marriage. When this was all broken up it was a major scandal. I remember when it happened, we did a video on it when it happened and it resulted in since then Marriage Visas are heavily scrutinized and I think it is safe to say that they are very heavily scrutinized relative to other categories of visas: Business Visa, Education Visa even, Retirement Visa certainly, even O Visas of other categories are not scrutinized to the level that Marriage Visas oftentimes are scrutinized. I have talked to multiple people who have said that they have had multiple inspections at their homes over the years even within the same year associated with a Marriage Visa Extension application; it can be something of a headache. So in a very real sense there may be better Visa options depending on one's circumstances compared to the Thai Marriage Visa itself.