NEXT time, try a sensible singles bar. A year ago, Dr. Robert Epstein, Harvard-bred editor of Psychology Today, attempted to force a shotgun wedding between two reluctant partners – love and science.
The doc announced he’d serve as guinea pig in the “Love Project” – a scientific experiment in which Epstein would teach himself, as well as the rest of divorce-happy America, to fall permanently, methodically, rationally in love.
The experiment, I’m sad to report, was a success – the doctor is smitten!
So why is this sad?
Well, Epstein is hopelessly in love. But the object of his arduous and clinical desires – a ravishing, green-eyed blonde he met on a plane – has returned home to Venezuela, apparently for good.
Meanwhile, Epstein, who spent months engrossed in such lust-defying tasks as charting the growth of his “physical passion,” today sounds neither scientific nor romantic.
He sounds like a lovesick puppy.
“[I’ve] reached a point – a higher point – when you not only are willing to say you love somebody, you feel you can’t be without them,” Epstein said, pining for his lady love, Gabriela Castillo, when I reached him at home in San Diego.
Does she love you?
“Her? I don’t know,” he stumbled. “I suspect she does. She is not saying [‘I love you’] to me now – but she has said it before.”
When he cooked up his project in June 2002, Dr. Epstein, 50, had a Harvard Ph.D., homes in Cambridge, Mass., and California, four kids, an ex-wife and ex-girlfriend who “hate me.” But no reasonable hope for a lasting relationship.
Rather than troll for babes on the Internet, Epstein chose a curiously sterile approach to end his romantic drought. He drew up a “Love Contract.”
He set out to prove that any two people attracted to one another could achieve a long-lasting love. Fledgling paramours who signed the contract would commit to an intensive regimen of couples therapy, plus heavy doses of reading, writing and even thinking about love. All Epstein needed was a research partner.
His first batch of applicants was a disaster: publicity-seekers, gold-diggers and wackos.
Then, on a Christmas Day flight to Boston, “fate,” as he calls it, intervened when he sat next to “an absolutely stunning” divorced, former ballet dancer, now 41.
On Valentine’s Day, the pair signed the Love Contract, and Gabriela moved into his guest room. It took a village of experts to nurture this romance, including Dr. John Gray, author of “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus.”
But Gabi split in April, lleaving him crushed. Epstein blames the suspension of the project on a “technical” glitch: Gabi’s three kids, he said, refuse to move to the United States.
Two weeks ago, though, she popped in to visit him. Now, Epstein is hopeful.
“This started as a concept. Now I’m feeling it in my gut,” he said. “I did not anticipate this.” Sounds pretty unscientific to me.