Robert Pattinson's character Edward Cullen attracts fans of all ages to The Twilight Saga. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

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Maruchy Lachance wants you to know that, at 46, she’s “a fairly well-behaved individual” who has a great job and a loving husband and son.

She just also happens to have a thing for a fictional teenaged vampire.

Stop judging. She can explain.

“I think that me and other women my age are completely smitten with Twilight because it takes us back to that age where there were no boundaries on love,” says Lachance, who works at the Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University’s Jupiter campus.

“It was a time where you didn’t think about if (your beloved) had money, or a future, or was a vampire.”

I don’t remember ever being an age where “vampire” wasn’t a deal breaker. But apparently, there’s something I’m not getting.

Recently, I’ve come across a lot of women in their 30s and 40s who plan to be among the breathless throngs of 13-year-old girls waiting in line tonight for the premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second cinematic installment in the saga of sensitive high schooler Bella, and Edward, the hot, sparkly skinned vampire who loves and tries not to eat her.

I figured Twilight was mostly a phenomenon among the young, who can romanticize almost anything, whether it be tenuous employment, or cheapness, or an overwhelming tendency to want to suck your blood.

But for middle-aged Twilight junkies like Lachance, who has seen the first movie 20 times and once took her life-sized Edward cutout with her for a friend’s Key West 40th birthday weekend (“He needed some sun”), Twilight love knows no generation.

“It’s a classic love story, boy meeting girl, and having a rival,” says Debbie Miller, 46, of West Palm Beach, who recently attended a Twilight convention in Orlando, “except the girl falls in love with a vampire and the rival, Jacob, is a werewolf. That usually doesn’t happen. It’s a complete fantasy. Who wouldn’t like to have someone like Edward in their life?”

Well, me, if he were going to try to suck my blood. He’s not that cute.

But it’s not about being a bloodsucker, according to 46-year-old Hope Resor Bruens, of Boca Raton. It’s about being a bad boy.

“I like the story line, about how Bella wants to be a vampire so badly. She wants to know what it’s like on the dark side,” she says. “She’s such a good girl, on the nerdy side, and she’s intrigued by these bad vampires who go out and suck animal blood.”

OK, I get that, sort of. That whole “bad boy with a secret sensitive heart” thing explains the widespread obsession with everyone from James Dean to Steve McQueen to Vin Diesel. The main difference is that while Vin Diesel might suck away your good years, he probably isn’t going to stick his fangs in your neck and suck away your life essence.

My motto used to be that line from Gwen Guthrie’s song “Ain’t Nothing Going On But The Rent”, that goes “You got to have a j-o-b if you wanna be with me.” Perhaps I should amend that to “You got to have a p-u-l-s-e, if you wanna be with me.”

I kid the Twilight ladies, but I do understand identifying with, as Lachance puts it, “the gawky, strange child in school” who longs to be the choice of the mysterious, unreachable guy — “That’s Bella’s thing. She thinks, ‘You’re not bad, you’re misunderstood.’ Have we not all done that?”

These ladies have all dealt with the disbelief of those who think Twilight is something “for customers of Hot Topic,” as Miller puts it. But they refuse to be on the down-low.

“It’s right there on my screensaver,” Miller says. “And I’ve been known to wear my Team Jacob shirt on dress down Friday. The number one (advantage) Jacob has is that he’s alive. Bella does not have to die to be with Jacob.”

Yes, that’s a plus, if you overlook all that wolf business. Bottom line, Twilight gives these fairly well-behaved women a chance to remember a time when love meant never having to say you’re sorry for wanting to be wanted enough to have someone risk everything for you.

Even the wrath of the whole vampire community.

“My generation was raised on feminism, which is lovely and I’m all there, but this movie woke up something in me, that ‘He will save you,’ that he’s a knight in shining armor,” Lachance says. “You just have to not bleed.”