Love is... more than a set of rules and regulations

The editor of Psychology Today, Robert Epstein, recently announced that he intends to begin an experiment into the nature of love. He will shortly be embarking, with a willing partner, on a six-month course of counselling and reading as well as dating and flirting. The result, he hopes, will be the deliberate creation of the love of his life.

Robert Epstein has already received hundreds of letters from women who want to join the experiment. A book deal (titled The Love You Make) has been negotiated and a television series is in the pipeline. You could dismiss this as an amusing, but essentially alien, American idea. But that wouldn't be entirely correct since, yesterday morning, our very own Today programme announced that it would be running an experiment to parallel Epstein's. Today's experiment will put together two listeners, and give them a crash course on how to love, and then see if it's moonlight and roses till the end of time.

At first I thought that this is nothing but Blind Date for boffins. If Robert Epstein is the kind of guy who believes that he can find true love by sitting through counselling courses, and there are women out there who agree with him, then perhaps all one can say is that stranger things have brought couples together. If there are a couple of Today programme listeners who honestly believe that the best way to find the love of their life is through being introduced to one another on air by James Naughtie, then, who knows, they may be just right for one another.

But the very fact that these are called experiments, and backed up by quasi-scientific explanations, suggests that an awful lot of people would like to take them very seriously indeed. Robert Epstein has said that he is interested in running the experiment because he believes that falling in love is a learned process, like finding out how to cook chicken or to mend a barbed-wire fence. If he can find the right lessons for himself and his fellow guinea pig, and they study hard, then he thinks that they can create a love that lasts.

Psychology Today, the magazine that Robert Epstein edits, is a great purveyor of this kind of talk about love. One recent article in the magazine, by Pepper Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, is a classic of its kind. Entitled "Love Is Not All You Need", it enjoins the reader to "be rational about love". It relies on data from "the Enrich Couple Inventory", 195 questions that were "administered" to 21,501 couples throughout the US, and encourages the reader to rely on those conclusions rather than "the initial chemistry" to make love last.

This reliance on rule books when it comes to love isn't new, but it seems to be getting stronger all the time. It took off for this generation with the publication of John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which went beyond the pallid advice of previous self-help books by giving couples a whole armoury of strategies to help them tolerate one another – even if their relationships were clearly intolerable.

More and more deliberately self-conscious rulebooks followed, all the way down to The Rules, the book that famously told women how to grapple for commitment by never accepting a weekend date after Tuesday, and always ending a telephone conversation before one's boyfriend. Ever since then the idea has been growing that in order to waltz away into the sunset you have to keep practising the steps.

It is interesting that these conscious strategies have found such a fertile audience, since one of the defining characteristics of imaginative culture in the West for centuries was the idea of a love that couldn't be consciously moulded. We've all been brought up on with the vision of an irresistible passion that must be followed passively once it strikes. From Cinderella to Casablanca, our bedtime stories have told us that when love moves in rationality flies out of the window. And old-fashioned, Freudian-style psychoanalysis only served to strengthen people's beliefs that love was essentially irrational and often destructive.

But today's fashionable psychologists, from John Gray to Robert Epstein, have dumped these age-old ideals. Love is no longer a galloping horse that drags you along, but a rather juddery old banger that needs an awful lot of work and care to stay on the road. In place of the great intermingling of body and soul that the poets dreamed of, the psychologists advocate a strategy of giving each other space, and co-existing without too much friction. Robert Epstein is scornful of the whole idea of irrational passion. "A lot of people who are disappointed in relationships come to realise that they've fallen prey to myths that permeate our fairy tales. There's the very problematic myth that there's one perfect person out there for you, such as in Snow White or Sleepless in Seattle."

In place of such myths, Epstein would like to see love as totally explicable and controllable. And it seems that an awful lot of people are deciding to go along with that view of love. All the heroines of recent popular films and television, from Jessica in Kissing Jessica Stein to Carrie in Sex and the City, seem to believe that there is no point sitting around waiting for a coup de foudre. No, a whole armoury of strategies to catch a lover must be practised, and the right rules learnt for every situation.

Although the best comedies lampoon that attitude as well as revelling in it, there seems to be a growing hard-headedness about passionate love in popular culture. It's no surprise that a lot of comic writers, from John O'Farrell to Allison Pearson, now tend to set their books in the aftermath of the first commitment – as if to bring home to their readers that relationships aren't forged in a single blast of passion, but knocked into shape over and over again over time.

One reason for this new pragmatism about love is, no doubt, the unhappy fallout from a generation who put their trust in passion and were often rewarded with divorce. Part of Robert Epstein's rationale for his experiment is that the Western reliance on spontaneous passion as a basis for lifelong commitment is not, in fact, the worldwide norm. "Sixty per cent of the world's marriages are not love marriages – they're arranged," he writes. "Arranged marriage demonstrates that people can learn to love." What a turnaround this is, when for so long almost all commentators in the West were contemptuous of traditional eastern cultures for not understanding the inevitable spontaneity of grand passion.

Perhaps, as a good feminist, I should be welcoming these increasingly-down-to-earth attitudes about love. After all, many of the most influential feminists of previous years, from Andrea Dworkin to Jill Tweedie, argued forcefully for women not to be taken in by any of the mysteries of romance. But all these new rules and regulations tend to sound more like lectures on how to conform than fresh routes to liberation.

Perhaps these experiments will work. But what does that mean – that if they follow the right advice, a couple can learn to tolerate each other and rub along without anger? Does that really merit the description love? Perhaps they should find a new term for it, something like "rule-based, erotic-friendly gameplan" – or just "compromise".

n.walter@btinternet.com