Out of the Rough: Love & Golf

"It's a trip, you know? When you're a kid, you—you see the life you want, and it never crosses your mind that it's not gonna turn out that way." — Monica, Love & Basketball

I was thinking about that movie, "Love & Basketball," the other day. It came out in 2000, and at the time, I was dating a woman who complicated my life in ways I didn’t fully understand back then. She’d break up with me at least once a month, only to get back together like clockwork. It was a toxic cycle. We were both dragging around our childhood trauma, both immigrants, her from Poland, me from the Philippines. That combination sounds like the start of a joke, but it wasn’t funny. It was survival.

I thought I was deeply in love with her. I put up with emotional and mental abuse because, honestly, I didn’t know any different. I grew up believing love was conditional, so when it hurt, it felt familiar. I’d done some therapy before we met, after a suicide attempt, actually, so I was starting to heal. But she wasn’t there yet. There was so much jealousy, insecurity, and unhealed pain on her end, and I just absorbed it. I thought love meant staying, no matter how much it hurt.

It wasn’t love. Not really. It was intensity. A trauma bond. It grew into something, sure, but it wasn’t healthy. What taught me the most wasn’t the relationship; it was the way my friends showed up after the final, messy, drawn-out breakup. One that deserves its own story. But let me just say this: I never understood how someone who doesn’t want you can still act like they don’t want anyone else to have you. That part was always bizarre to me. When she found out I was seeing someone else, someone I worked with, she threatened to get me fired. So yeah, that was the level of toxicity we’re talking about.

That relationship broke my trust in other people. Worse, it broke my trust in myself, in my ability to recognize what love should actually look like. But I learned. Love shouldn’t come with threats. Or conditions. Not like that.

My friends, especially Kimi, were the lifeline. She literally shook me one night, desperate to make me see what I was putting myself through. That was the beginning of me waking up. Healing took time. It took unlearning. But it started because someone loved me enough to pull me back from the edge.

That movie reminded me how our childhood wounds show up in love, complicate it, and distort it. In Love & Basketball, the characters choose between love and basketball. But basketball was also their first love, the thing that steadied them when people failed them.

If you’d asked 25-year-old me what life would look like now, this wouldn’t have been the picture. Honestly, I’m not sure what I imagined. I thought I’d be a doctor. But that relationship threw me so far off track that I changed my major to political science. Somewhere along the way, I started dreaming about law school, but didn’t know if I’d ever actually get here. And yet, here I am. The path was anything but straight. It was broken, winding, bumpy, and entirely mine.

And here’s where golf comes in.

My high school didn’t offer golf, so I played basketball. I wasn’t great. I was decent at tennis. But if we’d had golf? I probably would’ve played. Now, I love it. And I think golf is a lot like falling in love.

You never really master it. Some people give up because it’s hard and takes forever to get good. You have to understand the fundamentals to even be decent. It requires time, patience, and humility. There are days you want to walk off the course. Shank a shot into the trees, top the ball into the pond, or take five to get out of a bunker. But then, there’s that one shot. The one that lands soft and close to the pin. The tap-in birdie. That’s what keeps you coming back.

Same with love. Those moments when it all clicks, when it feels easy and right, that’s what makes the struggle worth it.

I’m really good at getting out of the sand now. Mostly because I get a lot of practice. That’s true for golf, and for love. You don’t get better if you stop showing up. You have to learn from your bad shots, work on your mechanics, fix your flaws. That’s the hope, anyway.

I still remember the first time I broke 100. It took years. And when I’m rusty? I shoot over 100 again. But once the season gets going, once I’ve worked out the kinks, I’ll regularly shoot in the 80s. Every year, I set new goals: hit my driver more consistently, learn my woods, shave strokes. I don’t stop learning. I don’t stop improving. I just want to be more consistent. Lose fewer balls because it gets expensive, in golf and in love.

There’s no perfection. But if you’re lucky, you get better. You get more open. More grounded. More intentional. You start to trust yourself. Your instincts. Your course management.

Because ultimately, that’s what it comes down to, knowing the lay of the land and making smart choices. Especially when you’re in trouble.

Like Monica chose to fight for both basketball and love, I’ve learned I don’t have to give one up for the other. I just have to keep showing up on the course, in love, and in life, willing to play through the rough and trust that the next shot might be the one that changes everything.