"WCT Top 44." "Totally."

One of my favorite scenes from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” — and I have many — is when Rachel (Mila Kunis) and Peter (adorable Jason Segel) hang out on a pseudo-date on the beach as she recants her ex story.

Rachel’s ex, she relates to Peter, was a pro surfer (Rachel: “WCT Top 44.” Peter: “Totally”) with a wandering penis who ends up crashing the party. Upon the sight of him, she — the seemingly laidback cool chick — goes out of her tree, losing it like a candidate on “Flavor of Love” and threatening bodily harm on her inked-up surf pro ex while lovable Peter tries to hold her back.

I love this scene. First of all, I love the character Rachel. She’s the consummate guy’s girl, understanding, sweet and smart and the perfect antidote to Peter’s broken-heart puppy dog patheticness. She’s the kind of girl you wouldn’t expect to lose it, Tiffany Pollard-style, on her ex-boyfriend — a guy she doesn’t even refer to as an “a**hole” when she talks about him but chalks up his cheating ways to his being “just a boy.” Yet she does, proving that even the cool chick who’d buy you a beer and not flinch about it afterwards isn’t impervious to the occasional freakout.

And while it’s  just a movie, Rachel’s “my-head-could-start-spinning-360-degrees-at-any-moment” vitriol underscores one simple fact: relationships, past or present, have the ability to bring out the crazy in all of us, even the most reasonable ones. The painful unraveling of a love lost is heart-wrenching and at some point, sadness turns into hurt. Occasionally (and often) into anger. Sometimes it has a hard time going away. It gets buried somewhere until it has a reason to come out at a luau on the beach, after which you can hit the local dive bar and laugh about it over brewskis.