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Of all the things to be addicted to, love might seem like the most innocuous option on the market these days. What better way to spend your time than being obsessed with the man or woman of your dreams?

But love addiction can be just as disruptive to your life, and just as upsetting to your friends and family, as addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Most of us have questioned why gorgeous Kate Moss couldn't just ditch shambolic drug-addled Pete Doherty, or how multi-talented Amy Winehouse could be so seemingly obsessed with banged-up husband Blake Fielder-Civil - but when you begin to explore the psychology of love addiction, it suddenly becomes clear that there is no other explanation: love really has to be blind.

Despite the millennia that man has walked this earth, hand in hand with his loved one, scientists are only now just beginning to understand what occurs in the human brain when it's in love.

Wading through a complicated jumble of neural systems and chemical messengers, researchers at Rutgers University in America found that being in love activates parts of the brain where a high concentration of dopamine resides. This is the chemical associated with states of euphoria, craving and addiction.

Love creates an intense high

Just like a drug or alcohol dependency, being in love creates an intense high (when things are good), and an unenviable craving and extreme sense of withdrawal (when things aren't so good). We've all been there - the question is, how often?

"It's all about endorphin levels," explains Annie Bennett, psychotherapist, self-confessed love addict and author of The Love Trap. "When you experience a dip in endorphins, you look to redress the chemical imbalance within the body that you're feeling physically and emotionally."

Like a high from a drug, love produces a euphoric sense of satisfaction and pleasure within the brain; as with any chemical alteration, the high doesn't last long, and yet that's exactly what the love addict is addicted to. "There's a swinging process of withdrawal and intensity," says Annie. "Look at Kate and Pete: there's that withdrawal, then the intensity of getting back together. That itself can be addictive."

Love addicts live in a world of their own making, says Annie, one where boyfriends are infallible knights in shining armour, sex is the key to intimacy and those peculiar tales Mr Handsome sometimes tells you never ring any warning bells. "The fantasy," she says, "takes over."

Part of this is explicable through science - being in love actually prevents the neural circuits used to make critical social assessments from working - but a lot of it has to do with your upbringing.

"A love addict will have love deprivation, rejection or abandonment issues and will be attracted to someone who has a comfortable or familiar feel about them," explains Annie, who attributes her own love addiction to lack of love from her father.

"As the relationship becomes more and more out of kilter, the partner to the love addict is likely to be an avoidant: he won't commit, he's always travelling, he's watching the TV or he's on the computer all the time. And the addict finds that she's repeating the pattern of being abandoned."

What's love got to do with it?

As the cycle forces the love addict to become needier and the avoidant more distant, physically walking away from the relationship becomes less and less of a possibility. "Denial is one of the biggest coping strategies a love addict will have," says Annie. "They won't take the risk or can't break their dream or fantasy because to break that would mean the bare naked truth, 'Who am I? What am I doing?' We'll protect that fantasy to an extraordinary degree."

It was only after her own partner, and the object of her addiction, suddenly died - leaving Annie in a bewildering entanglement of lies (he was not, actually, the best friend of the Belgian ambassador, and he did, in fact, have a whole other family on the side) - that the counsellor had to break her own fantasy and face up to the truth: she was a love addict.

"That experience was enough to rock my sense of reality to such a degree that I was not prepared to go on," explains Annie. "The gamut of emotions I'd felt with him was quite incredible. On the bad days, I felt like dying. On the good days, it was like the birds were singing and the sun was shining and everything was relaxed and I was calm. And that's what addiction is about, it's about calming our stress."

Look to the past to help the future

Keeping a diary of her experiences, visiting love addiction counselling groups and repeating positive affirmations to herself, Annie has slowly broken free from the cycle. But the process hasn't been easy.

"Either you make your life work in that relationship," she explains, "or you need to make the choices to make life work better for you. You have to have two people who want to make it work, but they have to step outside their comfort zone and say, 'This isn't working'. Maybe you need to step away. Look at Kate and Pete: it looks as though she finally got the message that it wasn't working and stopped banging her head against the wall."

But carrying on as though nothing's wrong has severe consequences, as Annie herself found: "If you continue to live in a world that's not grounded in reality, you run the risk of breaking up families, of showing your children inappropriate ways of how to relate, of having unwanted pregnancies," she says, having herself suffered each of those effects of love addiction.

"The propensity is to cross-addict, so if you use alcohol or drugs you often use other things too," Annie continues. "Addicts are often in control of being out of control: they'll find something to relieve their anxiety or stress. You don't know what's happening when you're swinging in that intensity, putting yourself at risk," she adds. "Love is a silent addiction, but an addiction nonetheless."

Are you a love addict?

1. Do you fantasise or obsess over your partner?

2. Do you put your partner on a pedestal?

3. Do you seek sex to gain emotional closeness?

4. Do you find that you can never get close enough or be reassured enough of your partner's commitment to you?

5. Do you often need to test the boundaries of your partner's love for you, to reassure yourself you won't be abandoned or rejected?

If you recognised yourself in some of these questions, you could have a problem with love addiction, says Annie.

- If you think you might be a love addict and would like to seek help, visit Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous

- The Love Trap: Breaking Free From Love Addiction, by Annie Bennett, is published by Hammersmith Press, priced £11.99.