Still, if you want to understand why gaming is less popular among women than among men, check out Grand Theft Auto: The female characters tend to be either prostitutes or nagging wives, slutty daughters or abusive mothers. Which is why I was so surprised when I fell head over heels in love with it.

Grand Theft Auto V lets you play through the perspective of one of three characters, none of whom are women. But the number of female gamers is steadily increasing, and with that has come more women-friendly options within games. In the online version of G.T.A. V, you can create your own character of either sex, which meant I was finally able to realize a dream: creating a perfect likeness of myself.

My boyfriend and I now take turns playing a terrifying version of Eve, rolling through the fictionalized streets of Los Angeles, ruining lives, stealing cars, murdering both the police officers who chase us and strangers on the street with glee. She is a sociopathic badass, often donning a baby-pink ski mask. While I never want to actually be her, boy do I love to pretend!

You can’t talk about the G.T.A. franchise, of course, without mentioning its reputation for being the most “bad for kids” game around. After the latest spate of mass shootings, the president, the Texas lieutenant governor and the House minority leader all blamed video games for the tragedies. Research continues to show there’s no link between enjoying a first-person shooter game and actually doing crimes. (And there are countless fun games that contain little if any violence.)

As violent as G.T.A. is, it’s also full of cheeky commentary about the world that birthed it: The social media network in the G.T.A. universe is called LifeInvader, the gun store clerk often reassures you he doesn’t keep a list of whom he sells his deadly weapons to. The game itself is a parody of our culture’s excesses and extremes. And healthy gamers, no matter their gender, understand that — limiting their rapaciousness to the virtual world in the same way no sane person watches a Tom Cruise “Mission Impossible” flick and decides to flirt with treason by subverting the C.I.A.

We now refer to making money in G.T.A. as “providing for our family,” one of several inside jokes it has spawned. Games have opened up a whole new type of media we can explore, much more stimulating than just bingeing Netflix together.

One of the best things about falling in love and building a partnership is that you get to try out new things, to discover aspects of yourself you never knew existed. In my case, I’m now a gamer, and never turning back.