When Love Becomes Harm

Renowned columnist, Asghar Soomro, writes about Fatima Bhutto’s recent interview published in The Guardian. In her interview Fatima Bhutto reflects on a long-term romantic relationship she once believed was love but later recognised as emotionally abusive and controlling.

‘Fatima Bhutto has made startling revelations about her failed love. She says she did not want to recount these experiences because doing so filled her with shame, hesitation, and deep discomfort, but she ultimately decided to disclose her personal story in the hope that it might help women who face deception and suffering in the name of love. Fatima writes that she wishes someone else had recorded such truths earlier, so that she too might have found support and guidance from them.

I know Fatima only as much as one knows a public figure: as an intelligent writer and a wronged woman. Unfortunately, when she was still very young and wore braids in her hair, her parents—her mother and Mir Murtaza Bhutto—divorced, after which she went to live with her father. At the age of fourteen, her father was brutally murdered in Karachi. Although Fatima received immense love from Mir Murtaza Bhutto, her psyche nonetheless carried the absence of her parents’ shared affection, an uncertain future, and an unnamed fear.

From childhood, Fatima’s life was marked by personal, familial, and political hardships, which eventually culminated in her falling in love with the wrong person. She remained in a relationship with this man for eleven years. She writes that she could only meet him once a month because she was excessively busy with her work. According to Fatima, he humiliated her in restaurants, shopping centres, and other public places, and she continued to endure this degradation in the name of love. Fatima writes: “This man caused me great harm, but he could not break me, because I was strong—and that strength was given to me by my father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto.”

As time passed, Fatima grew older, but the man was not ready for marriage. She began to fear that, because of her age, she might not be able to become a mother, and so she underwent fertility preservation in France to safeguard the hope of having children in the future.

Finally, in 2021, Fatima ended her relationship with this man and decided to begin a new life. Soon afterwards, she married another man, and within three years she had two children.

Although Fatima has taken an important step by writing about her personal life, emotional relationships are extremely complex and deeply rooted. If a woman as intelligent, aware, and worldly as Fatima can spend eleven years with the wrong person, it is not so simple to believe that other women will be able to protect themselves merely by reading a book. Exploitation in love can only decrease when we begin to speak about these issues openly and honestly at a societal level’.

The writer is a former anchor on KTN News and a columnist for leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan.