Walking past the basketball court on Legon Campus, one sees cute pictures of girls in their pink clothing with scarves and bangles to boot, throwing hoops with their boyfriends.

There is an exaggerated girliness as these young women attempt shooting the ball into the nets; their boyfriends stay close to them, guiding them as they achieve this feat. The image is quite fetching; they are the things we do for love, throwing hoops, speaking pidgin and learning to spit like a man.

Three years ago, my waking dream was to learn how to play FIFA 13. I wanted to be the best girlfriend, I wanted to be that girl who cuddled next to my man as he did what he liked to do best; play a video game. I felt there was a world I had been shut out from, that there was a sacred connection between him and his gamepads and I wanted to be a part of that world too. I didn’t like the exclusion, and  I wanted to understand how he could get so much joy from  kicking virtual balls. I wanted to be cool; I wanted to be a young man’s wet dream; a girl who had the looks, the brains, and the knack for sports and video games. In my mind the best girlfriend was like a boy; she only had larger breasts and a prettier face.

I think it is an honest desire in males when they long for this ultimate woman as partner, after all, some women want men who are sensitive enough to tell purple from pink. These actions all form a part of the bracket of impossibly mad things we do for love. We learn to like poetry even if we hate it, we make it a goal to like rock (what the bloody hell is that raucous noise), we study the difference between pink and purple and we take YouTube videos lessons that explains the difference between a penalty and a real goal.

We all re-arrange ourselves to fit into the worlds of the people we love, and it is just fine that we do so. It is fine that we stretch ourselves, just a little bit, to make our loved ones happy. There are times when we don’t mind the stretching, because it saves us from confronting the emptiness that we know lies between ourselves and our loved ones.

Sometimes we re-arrange our lives to be the best partner because it cordons us off from the revelation of the likelihood of incompatibility. We don’t want to know that we could never care about the things they care about so passionately, so we fill the void with activity. It is easier breaking our backs shooting a basketball than it is brooding over our differences; both real and imagined.

The things we do for love and the things we do to hide a void are akin to another in many ways. Do I really love you enough, that I’d try loving horror movies, or am I just afraid of not caring enough about the things you care about?