Are you sure about Ashley, Cheryl?

IT IS less than a year since she divorced her feckless, cheating husband.

She has just been sacked from the dream job that was meant to break America. Most women would be hiding under a Hagen-Dazs-stained duvet, phone switched to silent, front door blocked by a snowdrift of unopened mail, unable to get out of their pyjamas to pop out for a bottle of gin.

Cheryl Cole is made of sterner stuff. Forget the prolonged wallow, the weeping and raging at her sexually incontinent ex, her fickle employer, the world in general and men in particular. Not her style.

Instead she is off to Los Angeles in an expensively dishevelled selection of dark denim and shaggy lambskin, her newly chopped caramel hair twinkling in the flashbulbs. Far from drawing a line under her shattered marriage with Chelsea left-back Ashley Cole, it turns out that Cheryl has been cosying up to her former husband. Her disastrous performance on the US X Factor – ill-advised bouffant, raw Geordie accent, unwillingness to put on a you-go-girl, over-the-top performance for the American market – has been put down to a preoccupation with her love life back home. When she is not whizzing off to the States, she appears to have moved back in to the marital home in the Surrey village of Hurtmore (the name wasn't enough of a clue?). The couple are even discussing remarrying, less than a year after their divorce.

The new hair is, for those latter-day Kremlin-watchers who study this kind of thing, a definite sign. The burnished brunette mop that launched a million bottles of Elvive shampoo and cans of Elnett hairspray has been swept into the bin bag of history. There is no surer sign that a brown-haired celebrity is starting a new phase of her life than being papped with an asymmetric honey-toned bob.

For civilians, this seems like crazy stuff. Soap operas have more believable plotlines. But this couple's life makes most soaps seem slow and dreary. Cheryl is the nation's sweetheart, the most Googled woman in the UK. Ashley is a world-class footballer considering a move to Barcelona or Real Madrid. Their lives do not proceed at a normal pace. Within their gilded bubble of funny money, kissing, telling and non-stop paparazzi stalking, this is how relationships work. He leaks a story that he is buying her a new chihuahua for her birthday. She invites him – and most of London's celebrity snappers – to her birthday party. Before the cake is finished, the story has grown arms and legs and the birthday guests wonder if they need to buy a hat.

No-one saw this coming. Cheryl divorced Ashley in September 2010, their stormy four-year marriage destroyed by his cheating. The sordid details were there for everyone to read with their morning coffee: the secretary sneaked into his hotel room before away-games by Chelsea officials; the raunchy texts and photographs of his nether regions in tight white pants; the glamour model his friends tried to silence with 10,000; the time he had sex with one conquest, threw up, gargled with mouthwash and then resumed where he had left off. It is ugly stuff and, thanks to the internet, it is there, forever. A Google search of Ashley Cole cheating brings up more than two million hits.

So can the couple now make it work? "The hardest thing to do is go back into a relationship with someone who has betrayed you," says Sue Maxwell, a sex and relationship counsellor at Relationships Scotland. "Whenever something crops up, whenever the person is late home, it will be 'where have you been, who have you been with'. There will always be a paranoid perception."

Family lawyer Fiona Rasmusen, from Gibson Kerr in Edinburgh, agrees. "It is very uncommon for a couple who have divorced to remarry. I think I have had one client who remarried her husband throughout my career. It is a rare thing to do. Most couples who divorce wouldn't dream of marrying again." And they are the ones whose dirty laundry is not festooned, stains and all, over cyberspace.

Yet it seems now that the couple never stopped talking to each other.

Cheryl may have been stepping out with American dancer Derek Hough, and Ashley was seen in the kind of nightclubs men who earn 82,000-a-week frequent when they want to meet good-time girls with big hair and very small clothes, but it now transpires that they also found time to speak on the phone. He stayed on in Hurtmore, with team-mate Michael Woods moving in to keep him company while she rented a home in north London. Now Woods has been given his marching orders and Cheryl has moved back in.

It is, for the moment, on a separate-beds basis. (Not a problem when you have six bedrooms to choose from.) Cheryl has issued Ashley with a wish-list that must be fulfilled before they move to the next level. There are to be no more drunken nights out with the friends and team-mates she blames for his rutting stag party lifestyle. She also wants a new family home, a love shack in LA where they can escape the press, a state-of-the-art recording studio, a romantic wedding abroad, a deluxe honeymoon and a ring which surpasses the monster sparkler he bought her the last time he'd been a bad boy. The price tag on this lot is around 10 million.

It's not sure where Cheryl's mother, Joan Callaghan, who lived with them when they were married and who Ashley blamed for their subsequent split, fits in to this. Some reports claim that Cheryl wants her to move back in. Others say that Ashley is having none of it.

Whether or not her mum is part of the deal, Sue Maxwell feels that a list of demands is not a good basis for a new relationship. "It makes it his fault, he's done the naughty things, he's got to pay. Relationships should not be about acquisition. Buying people endless amounts of things doesn't work. It is not about emotional connection, it's often a plaster, papering over the cracks."

Clearing out Van Cleef & Arpels is a particularly empty gesture when the gift is for a woman such as Cheryl, who is already a millionaire in her own right. If she wants a ring that can be seen from Outer Space, she can call Theo Fennell and order one for herself. Ashley, who earns more than 4 million a year, could buy his missus a diamond for every month of the year without having to bite into his Bentley and booze budget.

What Cheryl and Ashley need, according to Maxwell, is not jewellery or holidays or another vast pile with a flat-screen TV in every room. It is a spell away from the long lenses to reconsider their relationship. "Normal people in their situation would spend some time dating before getting back together. They would test it out for quite a long time.

"They are obviously still attracted to each other – why wouldn't they be, they are both beautiful people – and want to be together. They probably feel comfortable with each other, more so than with other people. That's often why people come back together: they feel better in the relationship than out of it. It could be that they know each other well enough to know that."

They also, says Maxwell, need some professional help. "They should not get married until they have had some therapy together. They've been through something that's very complicated for each of them." Their high profiles make it even more fraught. "Celebrities get diverted into other things, chasing jobs, chasing shadows. They are often in different places, so sustaining a relationship is hard. They need a therapist who knows that world. They jumped out of their marriage pretty quickly. They need to examine the reasons they are considering jumping back in."

Rasmusen feels the speed of their split may be part of the reason the Coles are considering remarrying. "They divorced very quickly. Often when people separate they wait a year, or even two years, before starting divorce proceedings. If they had had that time, and calmed down a bit, they may not have gone ahead with it."

For Maxwell, this whirlwind pace may be to their advantage. "It's 50-50 how many couples get back together. It depends a lot on how long they have been apart. The longer they have been separated, the more of a journey it is." A reconciliation within the first year of a split has, she reckons, the best chance of success.

So an optimist might see, behind the ostentatious sunglasses and dazzling lipgloss, a young couple who have realised that they need each other. No amount of shoes, handbags, vintage Krug and pre-match bunk-ups makes them feel as good as the other person. They have realised the error of their ways, are getting back together and want to start a family. Awwww.

A cynic, however, might see a woman desperate to rejolt her career after being humiliated in the biggest showbiz market in the world. Having been dumped by Simon Cowell, she goes running back to a man who will text a pictures of his bits to anyone who wears a bra. Ashley is both her comfort zone and her guarantee of a permanent place in the headlines. He is also a spoilt brat who doesn't know how to say No and thinks he can mend a broken heart with a miniature pedigree dog.

Good luck to them in their new life together in Hurtmore. They are going to need it.