Cast your millennial minds back to the year 2006. Social media is in its infancy, and you might even still be using a dial-up modem to access it on your PC. Mercifully, only a few people outside of Silicon Valley have heard of Mark Zuckerberg – but you and all your teenage peers know exactly what MySpace founder Tom Anderson looks like. That’s because, as soon as you sign up to his website, a photo of Anderson posing in front of a whiteboard covered in scribbles appears in your “Top Eight” friends list by default.
If you came of age some time in the mid-Noughties, then the words “Top Eight” probably alternately fill you with warm nostalgia and chilly horror. Each profile on the rudimentary social media platform’s website featured a showcase of that user’s eight best friends, in a list ranked by how much they liked them. And if you were really good at rudimentary HTML, like one of my inner circle? You could code your page in such a way that no one else could see your ranking, allowing you to be even more honest (read: brutal) about your roster. We felt revolutionary, like trailblazing women in STEM, but we were actually just devious and a bit petty.
It was performative popularity at its most blatant; it was also addictive, anxiety-inducing (why has Becky P bumped me down two places since last week?) and probably laid waste to thousands of friendships along the way. I think I’m still carrying residual guilt from the time I demoted a once-close pal because I was spending more time with an older, cooler crowd, prompting us to drift apart entirely (was I ever so cruel?)
The idea of rating and categorising my mates hasn’t crossed my mind since MySpace was superseded by Facebook, eventually becoming a sort of Y2K digital curio. But earlier this week, a joke from Lily Allen (who, appropriately enough, was once a trainers-and-ballgown-wearing MySpace sensation herself) on her BBC podcast Miss Me? brought it all rushing back.
When answering a listener’s question about how to manage long-distance friendship, Allen offered up a novel “solution”. “I create lists of people who I like in order of how much I like them,” she said, with her trademark acerbity. “And I send that list to my assistant and just ask her to schedule the time for me to have a FaceTime with them.” Her co-host and close friend Miquita Oliver’s immediate response was, understandably, to ask: “Where am I on that bloody list?”
Of course, not all of us have an assistant on hand to manage our social calendars. But that wasn’t the reason Allen’s gag initially seemed so outlandish to me. Instead, it just felt like an anathema to everything that we’re taught about friendship; it seemed like an overly clinical approach to a bond that often fluctuates and changes, one that can be difficult to sum up, let alone place in an objectively ranked chart.
Allen may have been exaggerating for comic effect (as she is wont to do on her show), but I was judging her slightly. But then, a colleague admitted that she’s put time into thinking about her top five friends, too. A brief and extremely unscientific survey of my friends also revealed that, even if they hadn’t written it down or set it in stone, many of them actually operated a sort of unofficial league table in their minds, too.
One pal is so popular that we’ve long joked that he employs a “seasonal reshuffle” approach to his social life, recalibrating his inner circle like a prime minister rearranging his cabinet every spring and autumn. Perhaps he’s actually had the right idea all along. And wellbeing coach Rachael Carter tells me that she’s started categorising her friendships under three headings: acquaintances, friends and inner circle. “These three categories are helping me decide who gets my full attention, time, energy and support,” she says.
What’s behind the impulse to rank our friendships? Female friendship coach Cally Stewart tells me that this is “actually a natural cognitive process”, as “our brains are wired to categorise relationships as a survival mechanism”, to allow us to “quickly identify who we can rely on in different situations”. Many of us, she adds, will already be doing it without realising. “We can see this in decisions like who to call with good news versus bad news, whose invitations take priority and how much emotional energy to invest in different relationships, all without explicitly acknowledging we’re ranking.”
As we get older, and our responsibilities – whether they’re familial or professional – stack up, many of us just don’t have as many hours to devote to our friendships as we would like. It makes sense, then, to get clear about the relationships that we really value, so that we can better pour our effort into cultivating them, and also ensure that we’re getting out what we’re putting in. “I would have never done this in my twenties, when you’re still in the experimental stage of life, but I think in my thirties, it has done me good to be more intentional,” my colleague tells me, “especially when everyone else’s priorities change. People start moving away or having kids, and you have to think, ‘OK, where do I actually want to put my energy?’ It needs to be reciprocal”.
Perhaps the top five or even top 10 friends could be a way of side-stepping any lingering anxiety, too, about whether or not we have a “best friend” (and whether that person places us on the same pedestal). Once we leave school, it’s much rarer than pop culture would have us believe to actually preserve that one much-vaunted bond that exceeds all others. Surely it’s more realistic (and less stressful) to have a selection of people that you’re close to, and that you can call upon in different scenarios, rather than expecting that one person might be able to fulfil all of our friendship needs.
This might also help you identify “relationship gaps”, Stewart suggests. “You might start to realise you have seven ‘fun friends’ but no one you’d call at 2am when you’re having a moment, or you might discover you’re investing heavily in relationships that aren’t reciprocal while neglecting those that consistently support you.”
There is a risk, of course, that following this approach to the letter might end up “reducing something as rich, complex and deeply human as friendship into a hierarchy that feels more like corporate performance management than meaningful connection”, as Tina Chummun, a UK Council for Psychotherapy-accredited psychotherapist, puts it. She fears that Allen’s comments “seem to reflect a hyper-individualistic, time-poor culture where efficiency has begun to infect even our closest relationships” – and that following the star’s lead might make our friends “start believing they need to earn their place, fearing they’re not ‘high ranking’ enough in someone’s life”.
Are we all in danger of turning into the platonic equivalent of the man from the High Performance Podcast, who took his wife out for dinner to discuss their shared goals and relationship KPIs? Perhaps if we take it too far, and start giving all our mates ratings based on various niche factors (and moving them down the rankings every couple of days if they’re slow to reply to our texts).
But just keeping a loose mental list of your priority friendships, to ensure that you’re giving them enough care (and acknowledging that even those priorities might shift over time)? That feels healthier. Stewart suggests reframing this as “relationship intentionality” rather than a hierarchy, or thinking of it as “creating a friendship ecosystem where different relationships serve different purposes, rather than a competitive ladder where some friendships are ‘better’ than others”.
I won’t be compiling an in-depth friendship spreadsheet any time soon. Frankly, I don’t have the Excel knowhow, and my Top Eight remorse runs deep. What I might start doing, though, is thinking carefully about the handful or so of people that really make me happy, and vice versa, and ensuring that I prioritise the plans we make. Although I do have a quick PSA for any friends who might be reading: please don’t tell me where I stand in your own ranking. I can do without the teenage angst.
