Self-love is a central yet somewhat neglected theme in Works of Love. While the mission of this text is to distinguish the spiritual from the worldly conception of love, when it comes to self-love commentators tend to presuppose our merely worldly understanding. But there is an essential split between the spiritual and worldly conceptions of self-love, hence this cannot be what Kierkegaard has in mind. To illustrate this, I identify two places where the worldly conception and Kierkegaard’s claims clash. My aim is to explain the spirit’s conception of self-love, thereby to explain Kierkegaard’s claims. I propose to reduce self-love to "willing to be oneself," a self-relation figuring in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. A person loves herself in that she wills to be herself. Yet she may do this properly or improperly: properly when she takes God as the criterion for the self she wills to be, improperly when she takes a merely human criterion. This account clarifies Kierkegaard’s claims about self-love in Works of Love.