AUBURN – Tjerk DeHaan never would have guessed that Johanna was pointing him out to her mother when he walked out of church that Sunday more than 70 years ago.

A young cabinet maker from a small village in the Netherlands, he assumed she wanted nothing to do with him.

After all, she turned him down whenever he asked for a dance or offered to walk her home from the hall where they both hung out in their early 20s.

Now, the 91-year-old retired furniture maker knows that his wife-to-be was simply playing hard to get.

“I didn’t know if I could trust him. So I’d say, No thanks, I’m going home with my sister,'” Johanna DeHaan said.

Secretly, she hoped every time that Tjerk would ask again. He always did, and eventually she said yes.

Tjerk knew better than to ask for a kiss at the end of the first walk home. Or the second. Or the third. He waited until they arrived at her door for the fourth time to take her hands and lean in.

His timing was perfect.

“I was agreeable,” Johanna said, giggling like a teenager as she sat next to her husband in their apartment at Schooner Estates.

It took more waltzing and a few more walks home before the couple started discussing marriage. Johanna was 26. Tjerk was 30. And they were ready.

But the conditions were hardly ideal.

The world was on the brink of war. Germany had recently occupied the Netherlands. Along with most young men, Tjerk was forced to join the military. He was sent to work in a sugar factory while waiting for word that he was going to Germany to fight.

Johanna’s mother urged her to wait. She worried that her daughter would be a widow before she could even have children.

But Johanna saw the situation differently. She hoped the Germans would be less likely to send Tjerk to war if he were married.

She started shopping for material to make her wedding dress. She wanted white, but nearly every store in her village had been looted or destroyed by the German military.

“I had to settle for light pink,” she said.

The couple married in 1943. The war ended without Tjerk ever receiving a notice.

Over the next six decades, they raised six kids, moved across the world to Auburn, Maine, grieved the loss of their oldest son to cancer and supported each other through the decision to sell their house and move to an elderly housing complex.

Johanna recently had surgery to fix five pinched nerves in her back. Tjerk has gone back to speaking mostly Dutch because he has trouble remembering words in English.

They no longer waltz. But they still giggle and blush when they talk about the days when they did.