IT’S more confusing than the laws of cricket, setting up wireless networks and predictive text. More difficult to understand than map-reading, the film Donnie Darko and the theories of Stephen Hawking.

What is this issue, I hear you ask?

Is it the mystery of Stonehenge? Train timetables? Football’s off-side rule?

No. It is this: why is Cheryl Cole still with her husband Ashley? According to the insurance website confused.com, this issue confuses more people than all of the above.

Apparently we just can’t get our heads around why Cheryl has remained with the money-loving Chelsea left-back, after all the things he’s alleged to have done.

It would be tempting to think that this survey is just another PR gamble but considering that 4,979 people between the ages of 16 and 65 were polled, it could be seen as a fair reflection of our modern confusions.

And what’s really confusing is the more you think about it, the more confusing it becomes. Cheryl could have any male on the planet. This afternoon, probably. Yes, Ashley is rich and famous. But so is Cheryl. And unlike him, people actually like her. So the usual explanations of the attraction of fame and money don’t seem to apply.

Cheryl herself says she’s with him because: “Ashley’s such a nice guy. I still get the butterflies.” But earlier this week she also said the only folk she really trusts are her mum and her dog.

In an interview with Elle magazine this week she states that marriages have to be worked at and were not “rose-petalled paths that you skip down”. Advice that could have come from your granny in the 1930s.

“Love is real and the feelings of love are real,” she said. “But the thought that everything is going to be rosy and there’s never going to be obstacles that come in your way, that there is never going to be any testing in life, I’d hate that. I want to experience life. I want to experience the bad to know what the good is.”

So maybe the real mystery isn’t why she’s still with him but why they ever got together in the first place.

Cheryl aside, what else is causing us to rub our furrowed brows? Well, the most confusing thing is deemed to be foreign call centres and then algebra.

But it’s another celeb, Russell Brand, who causes us the next greatest confusion. What exactly women see in the tousle-haired comedian is exercising a lot of minds.

A quick trawl through the internet reveals that women as well as men are confused by this one.

Men’s Health magazine even has a whole forum which asks How Does Russell Do It? One reader writes: “I think Russell Brand is just one of those guys who happens to be a natural with the ladies and is also famous. It’s just charisma, confidence and he’s quite funny as well.”

Being good in bed, a dude and famous were also given as reasons, with one correspondent concluding dismally that: “Anyone becomes attractive once they’re famous. If he was a bin man would he really pull?”

Who knows? And yet another thing to confuse us.