The news that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are no longer Robsten is hardly surprising. She had a highly publicised affair with married director Rupert Sanders not that long ago, a public and messy indiscretion that had Twilight tweens in tears and ended Sanders’s marriage to Liberty Ross.

Add to that the fact that they were always photographed together looking miserable, and today’s news proclaiming their demise as a couple seems like a pretty obvious conclusion to a disastrous courtship.

And yet ... there is something attractive about them as a pair, something in their doomed on-again-off-again-ness that intrigues. Getting back together with somebody is usually a fairly awful idea – for every Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake (they went on to have a big Hello! wedding after he reportedly repeatedly ended their relationship) there are countless crying lonely-hearts wailing, ‘Again, again, how could you do this agaaaaiiiin?’ – but there is a compelling quality to the narrative.

So irresistible is the notion of the can’t-live-with-or-without-each-other couple that the Daily Mail recently tried to hitch 42-year-old Winona Ryder – back on the scene promoting her latest film, The Iceman – to 49-year-old Johnny Depp, a man she was engaged to when she was 20. The paper quoted an unnamed ‘insider’ as saying, 'In hindsight, Winona realises that she and Johnny were too young and immature to make their romance work ... But now that they’re both 20 years older and wiser, Winona believes there’s hope they can rekindle their romance. She’s even dropped hints to their mutual friend, Tim Burton, about arranging a date or even developing a film project for them.'

Of course, it’s not completely inconceivable that Winona wants Johnny Depp back, but it seems more likely that the Daily Mail is tapping into the public’s desire for a resentful happy ending rather than anything dull like truth or facts.

Love like Robsten’s – and they do seem like  a particular type of couple, more like a latter-day Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a murky mess of love and envy and ambition and lust for others rather than regular run-of-the-mill should-have-put-a-ring-on-it Biel and Timberlake – is overblown and completely fascinating: a how-not-to guide to relationships that we can’t get enough of.

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