‘I love you, but I’m not in love with you.’ An online search for this sentence produces over four million results, including its very own page in the Urban Dictionary. But there, as elsewhere, writers do not quite agree on what being in love means. According to Bustle.com, ‘the largest premium publisher reaching millennial women’, being ‘in love’ is a deep and abiding state in which we ‘can't live without’ that special someone. But a Huffington Post column tells an opposite story, in which ‘being in love’ is a fleeting ‘infatuation’, marked by ‘surface feelings’ that distinguish it from ‘true love’. That neither of these two columns pauses over the implications of its terminology is unsurprising – their metaphors of surface and depth, stasis and motion, inner and outer, are commonplace – but their conflicting evaluations of ‘being in love’ might give us pause. Is love a place, and if so, do we want to be there? Why does being in love signal a lack of control and helplessness for some, but stability and permanence for others? The answer lies in how we conceptualise spatial metaphors of love. If love is a container, its dimensions matter. A tight circumference and sturdy walls make for a strong and secure place, but what if it ‘hath no bottom’ (A Midsummer Night's Dream IV, i, 214) or if it ‘hath an unknown bottom’ (As You Like It IV, i, 194–5), as Rosalind tells her cousin Celia? For Rosalind, who uses the phrase ‘in love’ no less than thirteen times, love is beyond understanding and control; neither she nor Celia can ‘know how many fathom deep I am in love’ (IV, i, 193). Love as a container can be narrow but deep; it can be suffocating or perhaps porous. Or it can be ‘bottomless’, as Celia jokes, ‘that as fast as you pour affection in, it runs out’ (IV, i, 196–7). Each spatial orientation captures new erotic possibilities and invites different forms of action. Whereas height and depth might prompt us to ‘fall in love’, a snug fit invites us simply to ‘be in love’.