There’s a scene in the movie Notting Hill that has always stuck with me. Hugh Grant’s character is trying to climb over a gate to gain late-night access to a public garden and when he comes bumbling down, he blurts out, “Whoopsidaisies.” Julia Robert’s character’s starts laughing and asks, “What did you say?” And then comes the evasive, inevitable and unconvincing response: “Nothing.”

Nothing is rarely ever nothing, and is usually, almost definitely, something special and endearing. Sometimes our most private behaviors will launch themselves into public view without warning. Fissures in the walls of our minds occasionally allow our unconscious motivations to leak into awareness. Sigmund Freud called it unheimlich, while fellow psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called it “The Real.” No psychoanalyst myself, I call it “When I Think of Ex-Girlfriends, I Tend to Remember the Moments of Awkward Beauty More Than Anything Else.”

When I’m with a woman, these moments manifest themselves as quiet confessions, secret habits or curious rituals that go on when she thinks nobody is looking. They are the treasures discovered during deep intimacy, the tiny universes that are revealed when she allows herself to rest in vulnerability, a quick glimpse into the hidden life of another person. I love this stuff!