Outlasted Three Jobs, Two Marriages

by Johnny
(golfeaser.com)

Nobody decided our trip would become the most durable thing in any of our lives. It just turned out that way, one uneventful year at a time, until I did the math recently and realized what it actually added up to.

Four of us started this trip sixteen years ago, back when we were all working the kind of entry-level jobs you take because you need a paycheck, not because you can picture yourself still doing it in a decade. None of us are at those jobs anymore. Between the four of us, we've collectively had something like nine different employers since that first trip — layoffs, promotions that turned into new companies, one guy who quit corporate life entirely to start something of his own that either will or won't work out, we still don't fully know. Two of us have gotten divorced. One of those divorces was ugly enough that I genuinely wondered, in the thick of it, whether the trip would survive the fallout the way everything else in that guy's life seemed to be falling out from under him.

It did. Every single year, it did.

I don't think any of us set out to build something durable on purpose. The first trip happened because a buddy from college had a cousin with a timeshare near a course none of us could otherwise afford, and going once seemed like an obviously good idea that didn't require any commitment beyond itself. Trip traditions don't usually announce themselves as traditions in year one. They just happen again the following year because nobody had a good reason not to, and then again, and at some point — I genuinely couldn't tell you which year it was — going stopped being a choice we made fresh each January and became something closer to a fact about who we were.

What strikes me now, looking back across sixteen years of the same three days in the same general part of the country, is how little the trip itself has actually changed compared to how much everything around it has. The golf is roughly the same. The course rotation has shifted a couple of times as our budget's grown, but the basic shape — three rounds, one big dinner, a scorecard-based bragging-rights system none of us can fully explain to outsiders — has stayed remarkably fixed while every other structure in our lives has been rebuilt at least once. Careers ended and started. A marriage ended. Kids arrived, then started needing rides to their own weekend commitments, cutting into the calendar flexibility that used to make booking this trip effortless. Through all of it, some version of the same four guys has shown up to the same kind of week, year after year, like the trip itself was the one load-bearing wall nobody was willing to knock down while renovating everything else.

I think what's actually held it together isn't loyalty in some grand sense — it's smaller than that, and more mundane. It's that planning a trip year after year gets easier the longer you do it, not harder, because the hard parts get solved once and then stay solved. We know which course to book, which flights work, who handles the group chat, who inevitably shows up a day late. None of that requires renegotiation anymore, which means the actual barrier to going — the thing that could have killed this trip in any given rough year — has stayed low even while everything else got more complicated.

The guy who went through the divorce told me, a couple of years after it, that the trip was one of maybe three things in his life that year that didn't require him to explain himself to anyone. He didn't have to update us on the situation or perform being okay or not okay. He just had to show up and golf, and for three days a year, that was the whole job description. I make my foursome better mostly by not asking more of a guy than a given Saturday — or in this case, a given trip — actually calls for, and I think that's closer to the secret than anything more sentimental.

We're already talking about next year's trip, same as we always are by this point in the calendar. New jobs, probably, by the time we go. Maybe another change none of us can predict yet. The golf will be roughly the same either way, which after sixteen years, I've come to understand is the entire point — and it's a big part of why I keep writing these down alongside the rest of the group's stories, because sixteen years of nothing dramatic happening is still, somehow, worth telling.