Intruding on personal space

Sometimes relationships don’t work out. Marriages end, love fades away, so much so that there comes a time when childhood friendships end, too. People, who you thought you will always have in your life, suddenly aren’t there anymore. You choose to take different paths, and that’s okay. These past few days the media has sensationalised the divorce of Reham Khan and Imran Khan. Media outlets have used an end of a relationship to increase their ratings and viewership. It is sad to see the media thrive on such things.

A relationship is between two people; whether they decide to take a leap of faith and get married or decide to end a marriage of 10 years or even 10 months — it’s none of our business. Those concerned should include the families of the two individuals, and that’s about it. The entire nation does not need to know every little detail of why the marriage ended, or why they got married in the first place. Who you and I marry, is our choice, no one else’s.

It’s a tough time for both individuals, even if the decision was made mutually and without acrimony. We should learn to give them their space, to let people be and not make a spectacle of their emotional turmoil. It’s a tough time for their families as well. They need space and time to come to terms with this decision and change their lives accordingly. Journalists shouldn’t be attacking these individuals, even if one of them is a leader of a political party; he is a human after all. Just like you and I, he too needs time and space. And if you try to intrude on his personal space, it is only to be expected that he will snap at you.

Waking up every morning and reading headlines or nasty comments about this entire fiasco isn’t very pleasant. It’s not pleasant for those involved and it is certainly not pleasant for those who don’t want to hear about it. There are many other things in the world that we need to pay attention to. Things that we should be focusing on. There are people dying from hunger, there are children who have no access to education, there are paedophiles on the loose and our children are in danger and yet, here we are focusing on someone else’s personal tragedy rather than trying to discuss more important issues.

This particular instance of the media intruding on personal space isn’t a unique one. Hollywood break-ups dominate the news, Lollywood break-ups take up our headlines — break-ups in general take up so much space on our newsfeed that we forget how childish we may be acting by paying too much attention to these.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2015.