By Paul, Founding Editor, +21 Handicap
Issue 005 | The Timeless Walk
The short version: friendships don’t usually end, they run out of a repeating reason to show up. You don’t get that reason back by talking about getting it back. You get it back by booking something and doing it more than once. Golf isn’t special because it’s golf. It’s special because it’s four hours, it’s active, and it gives two people an excuse that neither of them has to explain.
There’s a friend I used to see every weekend. Nights out, five-a-side, someone’s flat after the pub shut. Then, without either of us deciding anything, it stopped. I couldn’t tell you the last big night out we had, because at the time it didn’t feel like the last one. It just became the last one.
For a couple of years after that, we existed to each other mostly as a name that popped up on Instagram or WhatsApp. A like here, a “we need to catch up” there that never turned into a plan. Then we booked a round of golf, more out of habit than intention, and neither of us was any good, and it never mattered. Four hours of catching up with nothing to prove and nobody keeping a score that counted. It wasn’t a big reunion. It was just two people doing something together again, badly, and that turned out to be the whole trick.
Why do close friendships fade even when nothing’s gone wrong?
Nobody has a fight. That’s the part people get wrong when they picture a friendship ending. Most of mine didn’t end, they thinned. Clubbing, big nights, after-work drinks that ran until 2am: that whole chapter of seeing people constantly tends to run out by the late twenties, and two or three years pass before anyone notices it’s gone. Nobody decides to see each other less. Life fills the gap that used to be theirs, and nothing steps in to replace it.
That’s a harder problem to fix than a falling-out, because there’s no moment to apologise for. You can’t repair a rupture that never happened. What you’re actually missing is a reason, something that puts you both in the same place on a repeating basis, the way school or a first job used to without either of you trying.
Does it really take hundreds of hours to become close friends again?
There’s research that explains why a text thread never quite does the job. Jeffrey Hall, a communication studies professor at the University of Kansas, tracked how people’s relationships actually deepened over time and found it takes roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 hours to become a real friend, and more than 200 hours to become close. Crucially, the hours that counted were spent doing something together, not just being near each other. Working in the same building doesn’t count for much. Hanging out, with an actual activity attached, does.
That’s the reason “let’s catch up soon” so rarely turns into anything. A phone call doesn’t bank hours the way an afternoon on a golf course does. You don’t rebuild closeness by talking about rebuilding it. You rebuild it by doing something together again, and doing it more than once.
Is golf actually a good way to reconnect, or just what I happened to reach for?
I’d like to say I chose golf deliberately, as some clever social hack. I didn’t. It was just the thing that was easy to book, and it turned out to have a property most catch-ups don’t: four hours where you’re stood next to someone with nowhere better to be and no phone in your hand. You talk about nothing for a while, and then, without planning to, you talk about something.
It isn’t just my experience. In a Golf Care survey of UK golfers, 87% said it wasn’t the game itself that kept them coming back, it was the people they played with. Golf gets sold as a game about swing mechanics and handicaps. For most people who actually stick with it, that’s not what they’re there for.
The format helps in ways that are easy to miss if you’re only thinking about the golf. Four hours is long enough that the small talk runs out and something real has room to surface. There’s no scoreboard forcing anyone to perform, unless you decide to make one. And it doesn’t require either of you to say out loud that you’ve drifted, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Nobody wants to open a text with “I feel like we’ve grown apart.” Nobody has ever had to. You just say “fancy a round Saturday,” and the rest takes care of itself.
Who’s the friend you keep meaning to call?
If there’s a name doing exactly this to you right now, someone who used to be a weekly fixture and is now a name you like posts from, that’s not a sign the friendship’s over. It’s a sign it’s waiting on a plan, not a conversation.
I’d like to hear who that person is for you, and what the thing is you’re going to ask them to do. Drop a comment. Someone reading this has a name in mind already and just needs the nudge to send the text.
Sources: Friendship-hours research from Jeffrey Hall, University of Kansas, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Golfer motivation data from a Golf Care UK survey.
I started Room 19 because I wanted golf writing that treated the game the way the culture magazines I actually read treat everything else, properly, not as tips, gear reviews and FOMO shots of golf courses. If you want the next one first, subscribe below.
Paul is the founding editor of Room 19, a golf brand telling the untold stories of the game for people who found it through culture, not the clubhouse. He took up golf at 37. Find Room 19 on Instagram and TikTok.