By HELEN SCHULMAN, NY Times

I HAVE a good friend who, like countless others, is addicted to Googling ex-boyfriends. Instead of coffee breaks, she goes on periodic search sprees where she looks up old lovers, passing fancies and mere crushes.

When her interest in her own history flags, she encourages me to look up mine. One of her recent e-mails read: “I wish there were more boys!” Meaning that since we both have been married for 20 years, our backlists are running low.

The men of my past, search-engine-wise, are mostly unremarkable. The outcomes seem happy, and there have been no real surprises. Except for one from (gulp) a quarter-century ago, a boy with literary aspirations who had once been a kind of mentor to me. On a lark one morning I typed his name, pressed return and hit a gold mine.

As it turned out, he was the keeper of multiple blogs, some of which he’d been writing for years: opinion pieces on books and music, musings on race and religion, and one blog devoted to his workplace (he was a teacher).

As I read over his various posts, it became clear that he was struggling with finding a way to gather these mini-essays together in order to write a book. That part of his life, writing books, apparently was a dream deferred. But the rest of it (a good marriage, children, work that was valuable) seemed like everything you’d hope to find when looking up an old friend.

Except his blogs weren’t all they seemed to be at first blush. Buried among the philosophical musings and literary exegeses were struggles of a more intimate nature. Somewhere in the course of creating his blogs, my ex had slipped into the role of diarist.

If he were a teenager, I suppose there would be nothing new here; millennial teenagers seem bred to leak their lives online, to air their private relationships, depressions and frustrations.

But a guy in his 40s? It was surprising to find that amid a cogent dissection of “Infinite Jest,” he had included an account of his outré dream from the night before. There was dirt here.

With just a few clicks, I had entry into an ex’s most-private life, and I didn’t have to suffer through the boring parts. I could skip around the postings and suss out what I wanted.

I did not look up from the screen for several hours, and when I finally realized I had spent my workday this way, I felt kind of sick to my stomach, as if I had climbed through his bedroom window and stolen his journal from his dresser drawer, though in fact all this soul-baring was posted online for any random person to see.

He’d asked for it. I hadn’t gone looking. Well, I had gone looking. But apparently he’d wanted to be found.

I told no one about what I had read, including my Googling friend and my husband, who wouldn’t have cared. Confession: I was ashamed of my own prurient curiosity, but I was hooked. My ex wanted readers. He got one.

Weeks went by, and day after day, before I turned my attention to my own work, I would first check online to see if my ex had posted anything new. This compulsion reminded me of how at various points in my life I’d religiously tuned in to “General Hospital”; there was a similar pleasure in following a narrative in daily doses.

I tried to stay away from ex’s blog, but I couldn’t. I wondered: Did the art project defuse that particularly nettlesome kid last week? Did ex have a productive visit from his aging parents? At one point he suffered a setback at work and I worried that he was headed for a major depression.

While his tone and interests seemed shockingly familiar to me even after all those years, within days I learned far more about him than I ever had lying next to him in bed. If we had bumped into each other at an airport or in the supermarket, the way exes do, I wonder if he would have told me even one eighth of what he freely gave up online.

As time passed and I kept reading, I cultivated a stake in his life, in him. “Way to go, honey!” I thought when he turned the troubled boy around. And “No, stop!” when he heedlessly posted explicit musings about his kinky sex dreams. I wanted to tell him, “Just forgive yourself: there’s nothing terrible in these fantasies. But do you really want your kids to stumble upon this stuff the way that I did?”

He was in need of a cyberintervention. I toyed with the idea of contacting him; I had a bizarre desire to help. The intimacy of his postings reawakened old feelings of loyalty and attachment — and irritation and annoyance.

I thought about writing to ex as myself, and I wondered if he would find it creepy. Was it creepy? Maybe it was.

I thought perhaps he would resent the intrusion (he’d been my ad hoc mentor, after all, and I didn’t want to appear uppity). He was, and still is, smart and talented. Who was I to offer unsolicited advice? Our relationship had mercifully ended over two decades ago, but online, once again, I was his phantom critic, his cheerleader and his confidant.

In a weird way, it was as if we were together again, on a more intimate level than ever before, though without him knowing it. And when I pictured him, he still looked the way he had when I last saw him, sometime in his 20s. I did not Google-image him. In this age of omniscience, there are still some things I did not want to know or see.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I could create an online persona who could contact him — another teacher who wanted to comment on his work problems, perhaps. There was a long-lost love referenced in the postings — not me, but maybe I could re-enter his world cyberdressed as her.

The possibilities were endless. He was naked. I was not. He had defined himself. I could be anyone I wanted.

This realization was thrilling. Less thrilling was acknowledging what a time-drain my habit had become. The whole business had become an exercise in procrastination.

It wasn’t as if all of ex’s entries were interesting. I learned what he ate for lunch, where he went on spring vacation, his latest running times. I knew when he had a date with his wife to go to the multiplex. Had they liked “The King’s Speech”?

I knew all the daily ups and downs of someone I had not laid eyes on in two decades. And let’s face it, at this point that kind of intimacy usually comes only with someone you live with, someone you have to listen to, someone with whom you have no choice.

But I had a choice. I pictured myself as ex’s shrink, the old-fashioned kind who doesn’t say much as you lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. The undercurrent of despair in his posts was real. Was he asking for help?

FINALLY I confessed. Not to ex, but to my husband, who, as predicted, didn’t care. And to my Googling friend, who couldn’t remember who ex was. Alas, their lack of interest did nothing to abate my own. Every morning I logged on. But I was saved.

Or I should say, he was saved. The day after ex posted something he decidedly should not have, talking about his students in a way no teacher ever should (“No,” I said to the screen. I actually said “No!” out loud, hoping he would hear and somehow stop), someone with sense in his real world must have gotten to him. By the next morning, all the blogs had vanished.

And though I continued to Google his name for a while, I came up with nothing, which honestly was a relief. I didn’t like knowing what I knew about my ex. It was a familiarity that came without conversation, a tenderness that lacked back and forth, an intimacy that was unearned.

When I was a child, all the kids in my elementary-school class had been part of an ongoing psychological study. We got used to being subjects in a room with a one-way mirror, although unknown to our observers we could sometimes see their shadows through the glass. Once that awareness took hold, there was nothing for us to do but play to the audience.

By the end of my cybertime with ex, we were a little like that experiment. I was studying him from a distance, or so I thought, and he seemed to have lost sight of the fact that he was performing for a crowd. But perhaps it was the shadow play of readers that kept him going.

Whatever, the lack of interface had turned us both into mirror gazers, constantly examining ourselves, until we had finally learned enough to look away.

1.
Offices are awkward. Suddenly, for no compelling reason, you begin spending most of your waking hours in intimate contact with the same strangers every day. You are obligated into friendship, necessitated into a camaraderie whose boundaries are anything but clear. Is it weird if you want to be friends, or worse if you do not? What if (God forbid) there is someone in the office that you like—like, like-like? There’s no avoiding it, no deluding yourself into thinking it’s fine; you are forced to see that person every single day, horribly and thrillingly. The situation is repetitive but lacks security: we all know we are just circumstantial friends. This is awkwardness at its most quotidian, inane and purest form.

What is it exactly? An emotion? A fabrication? A blinding moment of unforgiving clarity? It’s like porn: you know awkward when you see it. There are awkward people, awkward situations, awkward thoughts to have at awkward times. There is the word itself, which is wonderfully onomatopoetic in its own peculiar way. It is something that always matters more or less than you think, and never just as much.

2.
Something of awkwardness pervades urban life in general, underwriting the briefest of glances and interactions with worlds of potential mishaps and misunderstandings. Subways in particular: Hi, I don’t know you, but that pole you’re holding for stability? Well, I need it too, and if I move at all I’m going to jump to second base with three strangers simultaneously, so can I just reach around you like we’re cuddling on the couch instead? And no, I’m not checking you out, I promise, I’m actually trying to check out the person next to me by looking at the reflection in the window, which is why I’m going to super-casually look in the other direction at that mom with her kid—oh God, eye contact—and then look back quickly, and now we just made eye contact again because of course you’ve been watching me this whole time because you’re not an IDIOT like me, and now there’s no way you don’t think I’m checking you out, and now the person next to me also thinks that I’m checking you out so there’s no chance there, and that mom with the stroller that I stared at also thinks I’m a creepster, and oh, all of you just got off the train and I’m never going to see any of you in my life again and here I am alone.

The quality of the awkwardness can determine into which category a relationship falls. Strangers, passers-by on the street, exist only through its lens, each of you jumbled, incoherent fragments of action and perception to the other. Foreigners are people with whom you don’t even share the same notion of what constitutes awkwardness. Friends are made through awkwardness shared, inventing ways of laughing and living together that only we can understand. A romance progresses as you pass through all the other stages—the figments and preconceptions and expectations of physical intimacy—to the awkwardness of reality, and the heart-pounding thrill of being exposed in every way at the same time.

3.
For something so small and irritating, so embarrassing, awkwardness has a habit of inspiring near-religious reverence, particularly among young people making its and each other’s first acquaintance, initiated into the painful, measured ways of adult self-consciousness. This is largely because of that first awkwardness, the thing itself, the one that needs no explanation and from which all other awkwardnesses stem: puberty. An awkward word whose component parts are scarcely less awkward than the whole, whose mere mention makes me want to go crawl under a rock until the world has moved to a different backyard. Locker rooms, bathrooms, classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, bedrooms, basements, kitchens, the outdoors. Just thinking about it is enough to make me blush burningly and send me flashing back to gangly teenage years and the discovery that things are all so much grosser and more complicated and above all more awkward than you thought they were yesterday.

With age comes the supposed remedy: pretending that you understand the reasons why you’re awkward and believing in other peoples’ constructions of same. Now, instead of ignoring the issue, you confront it head on, openly and publicly analyzing everything that hints at awkwardness so that it becomes a bridge instead of a divide. Suddenly it’s cool to be as awkward as you can. It’s possible to take this even farther as well, using awkwardness as a weapon to cut through the social fabric. Some people hold their awkwardness out for all to see, brandishing it so obviously and so awkwardly that awkwardness passes from social phenomenon to metaphysical condition. This is awkwardness that physically, tangibly hurts. So acute that neither you nor those around you can ignore it and must confront it head on.

4.
Which is where romance comes in, subsuming awkwardness and rendering it not only charged but erotic. Because there’s always sex, whether implicit or explicit, consummated or unfulfilled. Sex fulfills and transcends the awkward promise of puberty, offering justification for the pain and embarrassment and sheer amount of effort it took to get through those years. But it brings with it a new form of awkwardness, too; the awkwardness of exposing yourself, bit by bit, to another person as he or she does the same, until both of you are confronted by the existence of an individual who is somehow both a part of you and not at all what you thought.

On one end, there’s the No Strings Attached/Friends With Benefits/Strings Attached to Friends genre of contemporary romance (or non-romance, rather), which is so conspicuous in its trumpeting a brave, new non-awkward paradigm that something about it becomes deeply unsettling in its manic cheer. On the other, there’s Kitty and Levin, or Jane and Mr. Rochester—stories in which tens of thousands of words are spent consummating awkwardness. There are a whole range of approaches in between and beyond these: awkwardness as a bluntly erotic turn-on during revolution (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); awkwardness as what unites two youthful outcasts (anything with Michael Cera); awkwardness made epic, intoxicatingly surmounted and then banished forever (Romeo and the other one). Flirtation makes a game of it; hookups plunge into and past it; dates codify it and make it livable.

Awkwardness lives outside your mind. Instead, it makes itself known somewhere between your cheeks and your heart and your stomach. It breathes out of every uncomfortable pore of the body. It is so insistent in its demand to be acknowledged that it becomes, by necessity, a delectable, guilty pleasure, until it seems the only possibly solution is to introduce your full awkwardness to the other person and either descend to earth or ascend together to heaven.

5.
I’ve traveled a fair bit, and as far as I have encountered, English is the only language that codifies this particular concept. There are approximations elsewhere, but none are so unforgiving or profoundly undignified. French has maladroit, which in typical French fashion is both more beautiful and less useful. Spanish speakers have incomodo, or dificil, or maybe peculiar, but their plurality dilutes their impact. I don’t know what German has, but it probably sounds like it hurts.

Consequently, much of my traveling has been spent in thrall to awkwardness that only I had the word to define. Being in other cultures lends the most minute of interactions an electrifying valence in which every step and every syllable results in either triumph or public failure. I would have explained why I stammered and stuttered and blushed when I meant to ask where the train station was and instead asked how to find the Eastern War, but the word I would have used would have meant nothing to these gorgeously sympathetic foreigners looking on in pity.

English has awkward. English awkwards alone. Does this mean that English speakers are actually and quantifiably the most awkward people on earth? I find this plausible, if a bit disheartening. There is no doubt a linguo-historical explanation. Maybe once upon a time awkwardness performed some roundabout evolutionary function, such as prompting removal from social situations that could damage one’s reputation and hinder one’s chances to find a mate and reproduce. Maybe it gave English speakers a way to stand out at evolutionarily significant parties. Maybe evolution just got bored with efficiency and decided to have some fun.

I suppose it may be our burden to bear. But I wish everyone else could know how delicious it is to awkward. It’s the great leveler of contemporary society: no one is so exalted that they are exempt. There is something beautiful and admirable in its impartiality—neither for you or against you, but simply a great blank, a uniquely synthetic and human creation. By Jove, it’s what separates us from the beasts!

6.
We (or maybe just I) have fetishized it—but more to our strength than our detriment, I’d argue. We do not fit like pieces of a puzzle; we do not want to. Awkwardness is a warning against complacency. A connection with the incomprehensible achieved only through immersion in contemporary life, a moment of awareness of the gap between your perception and understanding. It is the urbane corollary to the antique sublime: the social vista that slaps you in the face with the breadth of what you still don’t understand. It is watching James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-host the Oscars.

That’s part of why I like traveling so much, almost in spite of myself. Right after I return is when I feel it most acutely. I am in Dulles airport catching a connection to JFK, coming back from my gamble at being French, five months of melancholy and three weeks of pride at the close. I can finally understand what everyone around me is saying, and it is all so stupid. Eight hours earlier, every person was brilliantly, incomprehensibly articulate and unfathomably self-aware, a petrifying challenge I loved more than I realized.

There’s a strange pleasure in allowing awkwardness to become the defining feature of my actions. There’s a security in the foreignness, when nobody knows me or the guilty, deep-seated secret that I’m nothing more than who I seem to be. Perhaps that is the appeal: the constant presence of The Awkward makes the difference between my various reasons for foreignness difficult to discern. I am always, reliably apart. Whereas here, in the same language as everyone else, awkwardness exposes truths I cannot explain away so easily.

Which is why I say, perhaps against my own better judgment, Up With Awkward! Here’s to reveling in uncomfortableness until it becomes a tool to expose inanity. Here’s to forcing visceral meaning into the monotony of the everyday. Here’s to the painful disruption of complacency. Here’s to awkward endings.