Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards those we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a promise of home--in a world that we supremely value. He also proposes that the child is supplanting the romantic partner as the supreme object of love. May devotes a great deal of research to identify the meaning and the sense of love in the existence of human beings. In the last paragraph of the study he concludes modestly that discussing the issue is only auxiliary to experiencing it?in this lies May's book's greatest merit: to see it [love] as intrinsically human.