One evening after dinner at one of the yoga centers I lived at, a bunch of us went off to play basketball. There was a group of guys that played regularly that staked out the main hoop in the gym. They were all close to six feet tall, and they were good players. A bit later a smaller group of women with varying basketball experience arrived and took over the smaller hoop outside.

I love basketball, and I’ve played on and off since I was little. I played on a girls’ team up through freshman year of high school and then again senior year of college when my school’s team almost shut down and they needed players badly. I know the game and the social rules pretty well, though there was never a time you could call me particularly talented at the sport. I’m also 5’2″, which didn’t help my odds playing with either gender.

That particular day, I thought it’d be fun to be one of the guys, so I went into the gym to play with them. They were warming up with a typical pre-game shoot-around. There were basically enough balls for every person, so each guy shot, got his own rebound, and shot again. But this evening I noticed something I’d never noticed before. None of the guys helped rebound anyone else’s ball, even if it ricocheted close to him. The ball would actually have to hit someone for him to pick it up and pass it back to its shooter.

I thought that was strange but didn’t pay it too much mind. We kept warming up for a bit until I realized how greatly out of my league I was and that they wanted to have a really competitive game. No disrespect to me, but they wanted to get some aggression out, and I didn’t have it in me that night.

So I went and joined the small group of women that had started playing at the smaller court outside. We did the exact same warmup shoot-around, but I was shocked at how different it felt. In this group there was one good player who’d played all her life and a few that hadn’t played much before, but there was almost no competitive vibe at all. Again everyone had their own ball, but this time they would go out of their way to rebound other women’s basketballs. They actually stopped in the middle of a shot to run five feet away, pick up someone else’s meandering ball, and pass it back to its shooter. Over and over, I watched these women bend over backwards for each other at the expense of their own shots.

I was blown away by how the same game could be taken so differently. Both groups were playing casually just for fun, and everyone was good friends with and cared about each other. But the men, out of respect for each other, would not help each other. And the women, out of respect for each other, put aside their own needs to help each other. The most amazing part of it was that neither group had any idea they were doing it. They had no idea what their own group was doing and they had no idea how differently the other group was playing.

If this is what happens in a casual game of pick-up basketball, imagine all the ways it plays out in families and communities, at work, and in intimate relationships. And what would our world be like if instead of men receiving autonomy and women receiving support, every person was able to give and receive BOTH gifts? It would be a different world indeed!