The Powerful Passion... and Possible Perils... of Golf and Marriage

The Fairway to Marital Bliss... or On Course for Divorce? It depends.        © Golf Girl Media 

I didn't marry a golfer. I married an erudite Frenchman who'd never before set foot on a golf course.

The man I fell in love with all those years ago a few years ago was a competitive recreational tennis player, and when we traveled... which we did quite extensively for the first several years of our marriage... he tended to select our hotels based on their tennis facilities.  He also learned to make sure the properties featured an impressive swimming pool for his sedentary, sun-worshiping wife.

Golf came later, for both of us after we'd settled down in my homestate of Connecticut.  The landscape that now surrounded us featured many beautiful courses including one in particular where his newly minted suburban friends spent most of their free time.

Of course learning golf... and developing a (relatively) respectable game... is a real challenge, particularly for an adult male in the US, as he'll often find himself surrounded by men who've been playing since childhood ...and some of those men fail to see the humor in the myriad missed shots of a mature newbie.

But my high handicap husband has never been one to let such things deter him and, for the most part just about everyone he met... at the range and on the course... was welcoming and receptive.  Within a year he was comfortable... and addicted... enough to seek out golf when we traveled and it was almost a decade ago, on a trip to France, that he introduced me to strong-armed me into trying the game.  Needless to say, I took to it.

Last weekend at a neighborhood cocktail party I witnessed a somewhat tipsy suburban matron launch into a diatribe about her golfing husband and his all-too-frequent absences.  Then, later on the same evening, I overheard the bombastic hedgefunder from two houses down complaining that his wife had started taking golf lessons and now wanted him to take her out on the course.  Clearly golf doesn't enhance all marriages.

It does for ours however, and at this point I can honestly say that golf plays a major role in our conjugal happiness. Both of us agree that Chi Chi Rodriguez put it best when he said, "Golf is the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off".