In summary, this work has three principal aims. First, to show how love came to play God – and thus to be deprived, in key respects, of its humanity. (And, of course, like all gods, to be abused and misappropriated by its worshippers.) Second, to trace some of the debilitating illusions of this hubris: above all the belief that genuine love is unconditional. And third, to propose a way of looking at love that is truer to its fundamental nature – and so doesn’t burden it with misconceived expectations. Here I will develop the idea, just sketched, that love is the intense desire for someone whom – or something which – we experience as grounding and affirming our own existence. And that this desire seeks two forms of intimacy, which, when we learn to practise them in accordance with their essential nature, we discover are opposite sides of the same coin: the intimacy of possessing another and the intimacy of making ourselves unreservedly available to them. It will present a picture of love as a harbinger of the sacred without pretending that it is an all-powerful solution to the problem of finding meaning, security and happiness in life.