Shakespeare wrote that love is blind, but he was reckoning without Robert Epstein. The American psychologist has received more than 300 letters in response to his appeal for a woman to participate in an experiment in which he and the successful applicant will try to fall in love with each other.

Mr Epstein, 48, former director of the Cambridge Centre for Behavioural Studies in Massachusetts and editor-in-chief of the magazine Psychology Today, argues that popular notions of love - that it comes as a thunderbolt, and that there is one special person for each of us - condemn people to disappointment.

He also claims to be a divorced father of four who is too "cute" to stay single. "It grew out of a conversation with a female friend who said she had never been in love _ and one night I said, OK, she and I could somehow learn to love each other, and then we'll write a book about it," he said.

But his friend had a boyfriend, so he used a magazine editorial to advertise for a co-researcher. He and the winner, he wrote, would sign a "love contract" committing them to dating for, say, six months, as well as seeing coaches, counsellors and communication experts "to go through a learning process - and making a commitment to your goals, the main one being to fall deeply in love with one another. To me this is entirely sane. It's what we do now that is insane."

Dr Epstein added: "I strongly believe there is a process that one can go through, voluntarily, that will facilitate the creation of deep romantic love." And it appears many of his readers agreed- or at least they liked his photograph.

"I just can't handle the volume here," an astonished-sounding Mr Epstein said from his California home. "Someone suggested we should have a screening party to whittle it down."

Some of America's best-known therapists have agreed to be counsellors, he said, and a book contract is in the works, along with a possible TV show.

A conscious approach to love would not extinguish it, he insisted. Arranged marriages prove that compatible people can learn to love.

"I'm not proposing that we abandon the concept of love, which we would never do, and I'm not saying we practise arranged marriage. I'm saying we should extract from mental health research a process that will give us an alternative approach to romance."