Kierkegaard on Love: The Terrible Deception

The Quote

"To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity." The sentence opens one of the central passages of Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love, his great meditation on what it means to love.

Context

Works of Love (1847) is Kierkegaard's most sustained ethical work. Written under his own name, it explores the command to love the neighbor — a love that is a duty, not a preference, and that therefore cannot be excused by temperament or mood. In "You Shall Love," the second chapter of the First Series, Kierkegaard argues that the command transforms our understanding of love itself. The passage about self-deception comes at a turning point: Kierkegaard has been discussing how people speak of being deceived in love, and he now insists that the real danger lies elsewhere — in the person's own closing of the heart.

Meaning

The warning has a precise structure. When someone is deceived by another in love, they are still related to love — they wanted it, sought it, were open to it; the failure was in the object. But the self-deceived person has done something worse: they have turned away from love itself, and worse still, they believe they are still turned toward it. The deception is terrible because it is invisible to its victim. The person who has "locked himself out" of love does not feel the loss; they feel protected. And yet the loss is total — not the loss of one beloved but the loss of the capacity that makes any beloved possible. This is why Kierkegaard calls it eternal: it is not a wound in time but a closing of the door of the self.

Philosophical Interpretation

The passage is existentialism in miniature. Kierkegaard locates the decisive battle not between persons but within the individual: the question is whether the self remains open to love or closes itself off. The "eternal loss" is not a punishment but a description — a self that has chosen guardedness as a way of life has chosen against the deepest possibility of existence. There is also a subtle critique of the culture of romantic disappointment. Kierkegaard sees that people who have been hurt often convert their hurt into a permanent stance — "I will never love again" — and mistake this stance for wisdom. The passage names it for what it is: not wisdom but self-deception, the soul's own sabotage of its deepest need.

Legacy

Works of Love has become a touchstone of existential and religious reflection on love, and this passage is among its most quoted. The phrase "to cheat oneself out of love" has entered discussions of emotional guardedness, of the fear of intimacy, and of the difference between protecting oneself and closing oneself off. The insight — that the deepest danger to love is not an unworthy object but a closed heart — has been confirmed by the modern psychology of attachment, which finds that the guarded, avoidant stance is often a self-fulfilling defense against connection. Kierkegaard's warning remains the classic philosophical statement of the danger.

The Deeper Lesson

The passage belongs to Kierkegaard's larger argument that love is a task, not a talent. The command "you shall love" is Kierkegaard's insistence that love cannot be left to temperament, mood, or inclination: it is something each person is commanded to do, which means it is something each person can do, which means it is something each person is responsible for. This is why cheating oneself out of love is so terrible: the self-deceived person has not merely missed a pleasure but defaulted on a task — the task of remaining open to the deepest possibility of human existence. The "eternal loss" is Kierkegaard's way of saying that the opportunity does not return: a life spent locked against love is a life spent against itself.

The passage also contains Kierkegaard's characteristic inversion of popular wisdom. Popular wisdom says: guard your heart; expect disappointment; do not love too much. Kierkegaard says: the guarded heart is not safe but lost; the person who refuses love's risk has already lost more than anyone who loved and was hurt. The one who was deceived in love was at least related to love; the one who closed the door is related to nothing. This inversion is the existentialist move in miniature: the things we do to protect ourselves can become the things that destroy us.

The Wisdom for Today

The practical wisdom of the passage is an examination of the heart's defenses. After loss or heartbreak, it is natural to build walls — to decide that love is not worth the risk. Kierkegaard's warning invites us to look honestly at those walls: are they protection, or are they self-imprisonment? The person who has "locked himself out" of love believes he is safe; Kierkegaard says he is the most deceived of all. The wisdom is to distinguish the wise caution that comes from experience from the closed door that comes from fear. It is to remain open — not naive, not without boundaries, but open — because love, for all its risks, is the thing without which life is an eternal loss. The passage asks us, gently, the hardest question: have I closed the door on love, and am I still holding the key?

Relations

This quote addresses the deepest question of the philosophy of love : whether love gives life meaning . It belongs to the existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard and to the reflection carried forward in Works of Love .

Sources

1. "Søren Kierkegaard." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
2. "Love." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/
3. Søren Kierkegaard. Works of Love (1847), First Series II A. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.