The claim of this article is that in Søren Kierkegaard's notion of love as a basic urge in every human being we find a special dialectic between lack and surplus, between need-love and gift-love. Through a comparison with Jean-Luc Marion's description of erotic love in The Erotic Phenomenon, I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's insistence that love is greater than everything and therefore prior to both existence and knowledge seems, on the one hand, to point in the direction of a metaphysical anchoring of love, which would be foreign to Marion. But at the same time, Kierkegaard, like Marion, stresses that we have a universal, human experience of love, which is anchored bodily and sensed phenomenally. This duality points to the fact that Kierkegaard had a much more nuanced notion of love than that simple distinction between eros and agape that Anders Nygren invented.