What does he know that we don't? Epstein, the editor in chief of Psychology Today, recently published an editorial in the magazine searching for a woman who would be willing to fall in love with him. The two would read up on love, meet with counselors, learn to fall in love with each other and write a book about the process. If all goes according to plan, by the end of it he'll have a steady girlfriend and a book deal. He swears it's in the interest of science.

What makes him different from "The Bachelor" on ABC is that Epstein is attempting to prove a hypothesis that he believes the rest of us can benefit from: Falling in love can be learned.

Though he admits that falling in love doesn't necessarily mean finding a lifelong mate, he'd like both. "I would love to find love, and stay with this person and marry this person," he says. Maybe even have children, he adds. Epstein, 48, has four children from a previous marriage. He believes that through the course of his experiment, he will prove that it is possible to learn to fall in and develop true and lasting love -- and then bottle it, and sell it to the rest of us.

"We're very stupid in our society," he says. "We allow in this culture anyone to get married even though they may be completely ill-equipped." He believes that the way we go about it now sets us up for failure.

"The way we currently look at love is pretty hopeless and pathetic," he says. "It says, 'I have no control. I have to stumble on The One, and if I don't, I'm just out of luck.'" Though he's not proposing the idea of arranged marriages for everybody, he looks to them as evidence that our system of love is flawed.

"We do things the opposite. We start out with a passion that disappears. They [cultures with arranged marriages] do it with social support and over time learn to love each other very deeply." He says we confuse love with lust in this culture. "We date people even if they're not available," he says. "We will certainly date people if they're not suitable -- we'll date them anyway. Because the magic is supposed to overcome any hurdle and it really doesn't work that way."

He thinks we should swap the mystery and the chemistry and the je ne sais quoi that drives us toward each other for a more methodical approach. Enter the "love contract." Conceived by Epstein, written in a cursive computer font and garnished with clip-art hearts, the love contract is a document both parties sign and agree to honor.