What George Clooney can teach Imran Khan about marriage

Heartbreaking as it is, the playboy of the eastern world, debonair cricketer-turned-politician and the founding head of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf - Imran Khan - and his second wife, former BBC anchor and television journalist, Reham Khan, have parted ways, aka divorced with mutual consent. Their fairytale marriage, until it lasted (for just 10 months), somehow had become a metonym for liberal and progressive forces in a theologically-captive country, that root for liberty and equality between men and women, championing equal rights, and represented, for a while, the modern, educated, politically-oriented urban couple who could truly lead Naya Pakistan. Yet, it seems most good things come with a short lifespan.

Every magazine worth its ink had carried gushing, congratulatory pieces on the Imran-Reham marriage. A political power couple brings much credit to regional geopolitics: just look at Barack and Michelle Obama and the loads of good they have done to America's diminishing credibility in the world order. But far away from glossy magazine covers and glaring spotlight of a photogenic wedding, the lived reality of Imran-Reham marriage throbbed with the uncertainties that trail contemporary togetherness, particularly of the South Asian variety.

As Pakistan's leading English-language daily Dawn puts it, quoting a source, "[Reham] wanted to get involved in politics and that is not what Khan wanted at all. She just did not want to sit at home."  Though rumours of mounting family pressure on Imran Khan to leave Reham had been circulating barely six months into their tying the knot, the news of actual divorce has actually caught many offguard. Because, like it or not, many from within and outside Pakistan, had pinned their hopes on this marriage to work as a template for creating a dream Pakistan, at par with global democracies and in step with a liberal modernity that sees men and women as equal partners and stakeholders in creating a better world. Moreover, Pakistan, despite having a former woman prime minister who was assassinated in December 2007, and a stunning foreign minister in Hina Rabbani Khar, can do much with increased female participation to soften its ultra macho public sphere, held hostage to the military-terrorism complex that's of the men, by the men, for the men.  

Now, evidently, it seems that dream has crashed and burned. Dawn has reported how simmering tensions between the Khans owing to Reham's eagerness to have a public life and a thriving career in politics over and above just being "Mrs Imran Khan" has been at the root of their separation. Dipping with pungent irony is the fact that the self-proclaimed and indeed much-loved leader of the "justice movement" (literal translation of Tehreek-i-Insaf) has utterly failed to ensure justice and uphold equality in his own domestic world. Hobnobbing with the nastiest elements of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Taliban in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and his selective silence on the unprecedentedly regressive politics of many of his "allies", therefore, have finally caught up with his personal life. He could not rise above being a typical South Asian feudal lord of a politician who wants a trophy wife to catapult his political fortunes, but she better be blind and mute as far as public life is concerned.   

Contrast this with George Clooney and how impeccably this one-time lothario has risen to the occasion since he decided to enact the most challenging role of his life: being the husband of Amal Alamuddin, renowned lawyer of international human rights and legal advisor to former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Anan. The marriage of the then 36-year-old Amal with the then 51-year-old George C, whose suave Danny Ocean and irascible Miles Massey have entertained us aplenty, too, like Imran-Reham's, was subjected to a tsunami of applauds. Sighs mixed with relief were heard as women swooned and men smiled at the fall of George Clooney, till then the commander-in-chief of the self-proclaimed "commitment-phobic". Then there was some furious press at Amal's decision to take up George's surname and become Mrs Amal Clooney, with even yours truly expressing a letdown of sort from the tortuously perfect superwoman, who was now George Clooney's better half.

Yet, not only has Amal never been in George Clooney's shadow, it seems rather that the story is other way round, with the Hollywood honcho frequently and happily expressing his inability to keep up with his wife's superior intellect and political commitment. George, once the enfant terrible of many broken relationships and accustomed to being the blazing sun to a barely luminescent satellite of a female romantic companion, always burning up instead of burning out, is now, prettily eclipsed by his globetrotting wife, the glorious defender of human rights of imperiled men and women - from Julian Assange to Mohammed Nasheed of Maldives.

What's the difference between an Imran Khan and a George Clooney? It's simple: the former merely wears the swagger, while the latter lives it, embodies it. Handsome, successful older men as they both are, still much desired by women, attached or unattached - Khan, still the uncrowned king of Pakistani cricket and a marching general of its beleaguered politics, nevertheless remains a prisoner of his own pursuits. But Clooney - the dabbler, dilettante, averageish-actor forever playing the cool hustler Clooney - revels in his newfound role: not of a caregiver, but of a partner: in crime and commitment, in politics and love.