My personal experience, for what it may be worth:
The first time I ever picked up a golf club I was 19 years old. I'd gotten a job at a golf course after my first year of university (a big step up from the factory and construction jobs of past summers). They soon had me cutting greens and setting the pins. I enjoyed that very much. Though I'd never played golf I liked watching it on television, and I had (or thought I had) a sense of what were easy/tough hole locations, so it was fun trying to mix them up over 18 holes.
That summer I played my first round of golf (they didn't have a practice range, so I learned out on the course starting at about 5 pm.) It was challenging and fun and frustrating all at once-- but it was so very new to me that I ended up probably playing no more than 10 rounds/half rounds that summer. "Golf" just wasn't something that felt like "me" -- no one I knew played the game, and certainly no one in my family ever had. So once that summer job was over, so was my golf. Over the next 10 years, I probably played another 10 more rounds in total: basically once a summer for someone's charity event or some such similar outing. But, just like with the summer job, it felt like I somehow understood/appreciated the game more than I realized: I'd get out there, still just learning, and would hit mostly horrible shots, and yet at some point I became convinced that I should own my own clubs instead of renting, so I went to a second hand golf shop (long gone now, of course) and bought clubs that somehow I knew were good, i.e. old Ben Hogan irons and MacGregor woods, and a plaid coloured canvas sunday bag.
Yet golf continued at some deep level to seem very alien to me, as if people like me from my upbringing simply "didn't play golf". That was my own problem, I know, but the golfing culture I experienced over those 10 years certainly didn't make it any easier. I remember (or think I remember) being faced with pretentious and unfriendly people at every turn, and unwelcoming stuck up manager types, and young men my age working behind the counters dressed head to toe in Polo or Fila with smirks on their faces and barely hidden contempt as an obvious newbie with old clubs and retro clothes came up to sign in for the day -- but most of all I remember feeling very frustrated and embarrassed at not being very good at golf, and feeling the glares of the (supposedly) better players behind me rushing me to move even faster than I was already trying to move.
Well, that was enough for me. I stored away my clubs and half consciously and half unconsciously concluded that, sure enough, golf wasn't the game for me. It was too hard, and I didn't fit it -- and for a young man in his late 20s trying to make his way in the world, the last thing I wanted was to be bad at something, and to be made to feel foolish for being bad at it, and to stick out like a sore thumb to boot! So that was it: I was over with golf.
But then 5 years passed, I was in my 30s, and some friends who had become close friends over the years mentioned that they played golf and invited me out. And so I went: not because I felt any different about the game but because at least I'd be with good friends. Of course, living in downtown Toronto and with my friends being in the entertainment industry (and all of us single at the time), we didn't think anything of having to drive an hour just to get out of the city and onto one of the then-newly-built country clubs for a day, and actually spend the entire day there: breakfast, range, 18 holes that took 5-6 hours, late lunch and drinks, and then a drive back to someone's house to watch a game over steaks and more drinks. The whole experience (other than the expensive price tag and a brand new kind of pretention) was very enjoyable -- and that was the first time in my whole life that I felt that maybe "golf" and "me" were compatible.
Still, old habits die hard. I was now still playing maybe 8 times a summer at most, but slowly I was getting better and less self-conscious and more and more in touch with what was clearly (it now seemed to me) I game that I had always liked and appreciated. I started going to the range and started practicing more, and then -- and this was a big breakthrough for me -- I actually went out to a golf course all on my own, as a single, ready (and sort of willing) to be paired up with whoever they decided to pair me up with. I was a little older now, and less concerned with what anyone thought/said/did, but also more conscious that I enjoyed this game very much and so was unwilling to let any of the externals keep me from it. And going out on my own, I also started to find the little municipal courses in and around Toronto, the less expensive and, I soon found, more charming golf courses. One that will always be close to my heart was Lakeview, the Herbert Strong design from the early 1920s: low to the ground, wonderful greens, none of the glaring white sand and abundant water and banal Par 5s of the CCFAD.
And it all started coming together: getting better at the game, playing courses that for me were lovelier to look and had more humble atmospheres and that seemed to attract golfers who were my kind of golfers. I played more and more, began to consciously value and love the game and its courses, and I got better. I was about to go on a great and extended run of golf -- and then our little boy was born, and life (happily) got in the way. It was back to just a very few round a summer. But Ben has now gotten older and I have more time, and I am now, finally, playing golf to the extent and in a way I could only have dreamed of (and barely imagine) as that 19 year old who had a sense of the game, but who could not imagine himself playing it.
All of which is to say (and please excuse the ramble): there must be countless men and women who share not the same experience as I had but perhaps a similar one. And that experience can be summarized this way: If you haven't played golf from when you were young, with a parent or grandparent or friend, you have to really, really want (at some almost hidden level) to play it in order to get past all the "barriers" (or seeming barriers) to the game.
For the many of you here who started playing golf when you were 8 or 10 or 12, you simply can't know (given that as children we learn everything, including motor skills, so naturally) how hard a game it is learn and to play well when you don't start until your 20s and 30s; I was a 3 sport athlete in high school, and a decent one, and I have found no sport harder than golf. And for the many of you who spent your youth on golf courses and who had parents who played and/or were members of a club, you probably can't imagine how awkward and out of place some of us feel (and, sadly, were made to feel) at a golf club. The latter aspect I think is changing, much for the better; but the game, even with all the technological "improvements" since the Hogan irons and Macgregor persimmons, is still a very hard and frustrating game to learn and, in my opinion, hard in a way that is not "off set" by newfangled ideas like 15 inch cups or flatter greens or motorized vehicles or even tee it forward initiatives.
Peter
(Please excuse any typos or confusing passages - I was writing quickly)