Elizabeth Taylor and relationships

Amid news of Elizabeth Taylor's death, USA Today offers this piece: "What Elizabeth Taylor taught us about love, passion."

I'm always leery of a tendency to assume every celebrity's life teaches us major lessons. Go ahead, call somebody a great actress or a pioneer in entertainment. But those skills rarely translate into a life that offers more teachable moments than a typical existence.

If there's a lesson to learn from Elizabeth Taylor, it's that celebrity status hardly gives you a leg up in understanding the relationship world.

Or maybe the lesson is that we need to stop looking for relationship lessons.