ELIZABETH Taylor was adored by men.

But women loved her almost as much – perhaps because, while the actress was in thrall to the institution of marriage and the sparkling rocks that came with it, she didn't let that stand in the way of her pursuit of personal happiness. So what if, following the sudden death of her third husband, Mike Todd, she wailed with grief and considered suicide? She moved on – to Eddie Fisher, husband of Debbie Reynolds. And although Richard Burton was the big love of her life, she wasn't going to suffer through the whole trauma of being married to a difficult alcoholic, at least not without a break in the middle.

Taylor could be seen as a proto post-feminist, a woman who was happy to enjoy her sexuality and a cultural antidote to the ubiquitous cliché of the promiscuous serial womaniser and fatherer. Of course, Taylor was a woman of her time and mores – she once said that she had only ever had sex with her husbands (all seven of them) – and that probably informed her need for getting married.

But despite this, she put a hatchet in the notion that it's only women who are after the lifetime committed relationship, and men that are dragged into it. The Liz Taylor story tells us that there's no big shame in divorce, nor is there anything wrong in putting on a fancy dress and doing it all over again – and again. If you want to celebrate your love, even if the certificate is only going to last a year (as with her second marriage to Burton), then go on and do it.

Of course, one can never know any individual's secret sufferings, but Taylor appeared to be the antithesis of the long-suffering wife. Marriage in the past wasn't all that good for women and though times have changed and the lot of a wife has vastly improved, there are still many who feel trapped by it (I say this as a woman who is married and very happy with her lot).

The story we continue to tell about marriage is that it is hard work, something into which you have to put effort. Like a garden that bears fruit after many years of toil, it will reward you in the end. If, on the other hand, it breaks up or fails to satisfy, it's your own sorry fault, slacker. When you consider all this exhausting effort, it's hard to believe that lifelong pairing is really the natural lot of humans and not just a cultural invention.

In many ways, we as a society are loosening our grip on the idea of the lifelong love. We are sliding, via the common pattern of several cohabitational relationships before settling down to have kids, towards serial monogamy. Already we have acknowledged that lifelong marriage doesn't suit human needs and desires all that well. Since we are still fed endless romantic tales about finding "the one", however, we are also doomed to feeling that we have failed when we don't conform. Yet as a culture, we still feel duty-bound to squeeze into the one-size-fits-all wedding dress forever because we know, from the statistics, that divorce is bad for kids, as is growing up without a male role model.

It's often said that Taylor lived her life like a soap opera character, and her relationship history would certainly make a good plotline. We like the fact that she found a big love in Richard Burton, yet could not live with him. We love the story about the time she told Eddie Fisher to shut up playing the piano because she wanted to flirt with Burton.

My feeling is we like Taylor because her life, stripped bare of the diamonds, wealth and wedding rings, wasn't so very distant from that of many women today – who perhaps had their children with one man, hitched up with another for a while, married a third, and then fell in love with another.

We often call this dysfunctional, the "breakdown" of family life, but is it really the crisis we make it out to be? Isn't it, rather, part of a slow evolution away from an institution that has never served human beings all that well? Some people struggle on with one person; Taylor just got out and got married again.

So, is human happiness to be found in a Tayloresque succession of weddings? Last year, a book published in the United States caused some controversy. In Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality, husband and wife Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha (one a psychologist, the other a psychiatrist), argued that human beings were not naturally monogamous, and that in hunter-gatherer communities, women often had sex with a number of different men.

This meant it was never really certain who was the father of any child, and so fathering became a function of all men in the tribe. Ryan pointed out: "Though often casual, these relationships were not random or meaningless. Quite the opposite: they reinforced crucial social ties holding these highly inter-dependent communities together."

Taylor knew the madness and folly of her desire for marriage. "I am a very committed wife," she once said. "And I should be committed too – for being married so many times." But she also said she was very attached to the institution. As a married person, I am too.

But Taylor is a reminder that there is another way. Relationships can be chapters in people's lives, or even, as Sex At Dawn suggests, form many parallel plots – and there is nothing so very wrong with that. Indeed, it may be what feels right to human beings, even if it seems unworkable in our atomised society of today.

That doesn't necessarily mean we should all join a commune, cultivate open marriages or sign up to a swinging club. Rather it means we should be kinder to ourselves. We should forgive ourselves if it does all go wrong and remind ourselves to say: "Well, wasn't it great while it lasted?"