Mad love: Time of life or state of mind?

I know of two women in the throes of mad, bad love.

V., 62, has been living with one man for 20 years. Two years ago she began an affair with a man who lives in their condo building; he's 21 years younger. The scenario: wonderful to her, awful to her. There, absent. Flowers and champagne, insults.

She waits for his appearance, says she can plan nothing because she never knows where he is, when he will drop in to whip up a marvelous dinner. He is interested in children and marriage– and therefore a woman much younger than V.– but "cannot leave her." V.'s partner knows about the liaison, thinks it is an infatuation, and leaves this month for an extended trip. They will discuss what to do when he returns next spring.

H. is 53, in a decade-long relationship with a man whose behaviour is marked by control- he tells her where to put down a glass- and more troubling actions. Several breakups, lauded by her four sisters, crumpled in fear of loneliness and her assertion that "we love each other".

Most of us in relationships go through ebb and flow, irritation and appreciation, doubts and certainty. Those not in relationships but desirous of one hope to meet someone intelligent, kind and mature: a grown-up.

But some choose difficult partners, the ones whose behaviour shocks and worries their friends or family. H.' s sister says "Though I realize I'm hearing only her side of the story, I've begged her to end it. I worry about her health."

I was thinking in the same black and white way when I came across a wholly different perspective, "A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century" by Cristina Nehring. She criticizes modern love that is afraid of ardor (even that of a chaste relationship), and deplores the trade of passion for reason.

She prizes tumultuous struggle, yearning and risk, and says that we've drifted toward a sanitized, safe love, devoted to boring complacency. Nehring wants to reclaim a "fearless and romantic provenance" (though critics point out this provenance usually depends on inequality).

This kind of love is heroic, according to her, because it involves suffering. She illustrates this point by describing the affairs of Mary Wollstonecraft, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson, among others: "At its strongest and wildest and most authentic, love is a demon. It is a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism."

I imagine H. and V. saying, no shit, Sherlock.

Nehring has raised my awareness that, at this point in life, I want companionship, contentment and constancy. I value passion, too, though am no longer willing to be a regular donor at the blood bank of broken hearts, as I did in my 20s.

Despite Nehring's advocacy for love on the edge, my wish for these women is that each receive love that sustains, rather than destroys, and (the corollary) learn to live on one's own.

Entering one's sixth or seventh decade, have we not learned enough to say, alluring... but no?

Or is the desire for someone, as Lady Caroline Lamb assessed her lover, Byron,"mad, bad and dangerous to know" an adventure for which some of us will still sign up?