their life

To say that their love blossomed would be a lie. They settled into more of an exercise of détente. He later would struggle to remember happy times during those early years, but he would never distinguish them as disappointing. They were more like playing house, he would think. And as he would recall, too, her teasing coldness he took more as a challenge: he would make her love him, not because it was him, necessarily, but because he sensed that she wanted to love someone. He was wrong, as he would later see, on both accounts. It was because it was him. He needed to be loved. And, two, the other mistake: she had no desire to love anyone.