Throughout his childhood and young adulthood, Nash is largely happy to “live inside his own head” (167). He enjoys experiments and reasoning and “his overriding interest [is] in patterns, not people” (167). However, when he starts working at MIT, “he discover[s] that he [has] some of the same wishes as others” (167) and begins to make and enjoy more relationships and human connections.

Over the next five years, he becomes “emotionally involved with at least three other men” (167), has a child with a mistress he later abandons, and gets married. Soon, his “formerly solitary but coherent existence” (167) becomes a complex world of relationships with people who were largely ignorant of each other’s existence.

Of course, this “accretion of significant relationships with others [brings] demands for integration” (168) that Nash is not always able to meet. While he satisfies “his own emotional needs for connectedness” (168), he largely fails to support the emotional needs of others, generally assuming that other people should simply “be satisfied with his genius” (168).   

Nash’s first attempts at sexual or romantic relationships “were one-sided and unrequited” (169). Generally, he was immature and inexperienced in love, acting much like an adolescent with a crush.