In various writings, Epstein has been a strong advocate of the view that people can deliberately learn to love each other. He studied arranged marriages and found that in many of them the partners developed greater feelings of affection for each other than did couples who had married for love. In 2002 he published a study in which he said that many couples marry for other reasons than love, and develop love in their relationships over time. He gave students in one of his classes at University of California, San Diego extra credit for taking part in affection building exercises. At one time he used himself as an experimental subject to investigate this proposition.