my friend Sam does not waste a single bite of an apple. He crunches through the core, swallows the kernels and leaves nothing behind but the stalk. In this way, he could not be more different from our mutual friend Megan, who refuses to eat apples unless they are sliced. Sam does not own an umbrella. Megan changes her sheets every week. Neither Sam nor Megan particularly likes to strike up conversations with strangers. When Sam was a kid, he had to be taken home from his very first sleepover for vomiting Turkey Twizzlers on the carpet.
These are the kind of unsatisfying facts people know about their loved ones in movies – like Harry told Sally, “I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees outside. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.” In real life, we pass the time talking to our friends about their children, co-workers, exes, and eccentric family members, but we don’t always hear about the meaningless minutiae that make up their daily lives. This is why I sincerely recommend that everyone start doing one thing: ranking your friends.
What an evil and utterly offensive proposition! Let’s not get things twisted: I don’t think you should rank your friends based on how much you like them, or how cool or beautiful they are, or how close you consider yourself. Instead, you have to rank your friends in arbitrary, nonsensical, and conversational ways.
I know about Sam and Megan’s apple eating habits because one day I posted a simple sentence in our group chat: “Friends ranked by how close they get to the core when they finish an apple.” The resulting conversation was lively – Anya comes to a tough button (I knew it) and Zoe takes careful bites and avoids the center. I now have a 27 second video of Sam eating an apple, core and all.
Last April, someone wrote after the Guardiansay anxiety aunt about their friend ranking loved ones. My ranking is, I hope, the exact opposite of this – not private, secretive, score keeping, but collaborative fun. This is something your friends can do together, as a group. It is about observing and understanding each other. Categories included the simple and straightforward: friends ranked by how often they have McDonald’s; friends ranked by how early their bedtime is; friends ranked by their likelihood of missing a plane. Things also shifted in the direction of disturbing specifics: friends ranked by who eats the most artificially blue foods; friends who most likely called home as a child to be picked up from a sleepover; friends ranked by how much they fear death.
I started my ranking spontaneously when I was eating McDonald’s while a group chat was coming up. When faced with these two stimuli simultaneously, I thought: I wonder who in this conversation has McDonald’s most often. I ranked my friends and wasn’t particularly surprised by the results. The game was a resounding success and as the days went by, everyone started throwing out different categories and discussing things we had never discussed before.
Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have once said, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people,” but to me that sentiment has never made sense. How can you discuss ideas or events without discussing people? Still, there is truth at the heart of it – how many dinners have been spent whining about a conniving boss or the woman in your industry who is doing better than you, but in an annoying way? How often does someone call to discuss how they are eating an apple?
And well, there’s a reason people don’t. Observations on the minutiae of life are the stuff of debut novels or very long Instagram captions. Bring this stuff up spontaneously and you risk looking like a quirky manic pixie dream girl who likes blue raspberry.
And yet, quite by accident, “the rankings” allowed me and my friends to talk about this pointless, silly stuff, often with unexpected results. One dull afternoon, a simple ranking list – who goes to bed the earliest – provoked a surprising conversation. I thought Clara, like me, would go to bed late, but she often has an early night. Why? Clara wakes up early because she has therapy at 7am every day. It was an intimate aspect of her life that she had never disclosed to me before, and it opened up a discussion about our mental health.
So the ranking can be a window to self-awareness. As another pal put it, “To be ranked and to rank is to know and be fully known.”
Again, I must stress that ranking your friends isn’t about scales of good to bad – it’s certainly not about yearbook awards like, “Most likely to be a billionaire” or “Most likely to win a beauty pageant.” not.” One friend who enjoys the leaderboards remembers a terrible occasion, years ago, where a group of her pals decided to play “the paper game.” They tore up strips and wrote things like, “prettiest” and “worst bum” on them – everyone then got a pile and had to hand it out to whoever they felt best suited the title. Somehow, my friend says, it was worse when the group decided to write only “sweets”. She sat there watching one friend accumulate a snow pile of paper while being awarded “most unusual sense of humor”.
“This game celebrates everyone’s differences,” she says. “Often in life you want to be safely in the middle because of our judgmental society, but the rankings reward authenticity – being at one extreme is a good thing.”
To play my game properly, rankings should never be about “most” or “best”, and you can avoid offending people by putting yourself at the top or bottom of the most controversial people (although it’s true that I the Friend are most likely to get a UTI because they don’t dare ask a stranger to look at their laptop in the cafe). The rankings aren’t even about fixing things – they’re a way to open up a conversation and give someone an opportunity to share more about the little parts of their lives.
As adults we still have to play. Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Other: Reimagining life with friendship at the centerhas written in the past about how adults need to “waste time together” like children do in order to bond and make memories. Write in The Atlantic Ocean, Cohen argued that adult social events can often feel outdated compared to the strange and creative rituals and traditions we develop with friends as children. “Our desire for playful connection does not disappear after childhood,” she wrote. “To enjoy the rewards of play, you have to take risks, but adults are often too consumed by self-consciousness to run with someone’s silly idea, let alone propose one.”
I proposed and ran with a silly idea – and I can now confidently say which of my friends listens to the most showtunes and also know how much my friend Mia’s mind spirals when her partner slowly returns from the shop. Unlike Beth, she doesn’t really worry about death, but the loss of her loved ones haunts her in these quiet moments. Of course you can have these discussions with your friends without introducing arbitrary rankings – I don’t mean to sound like I’ve never had a conversation before – but the framework is, more than anything, an opportunity.
The leaderboard has now spread from friend group to friend group and I am endlessly happy about the increasing numbers participating.
“It’s a game that cuts to the core of what’s so great about friendship: someone who knows about, and cares about, your preferences and beliefs – deep and frivolous,” says one of my pals with whom I’ve played the game play months. “When we play ranked, what we’re really doing is saying, ‘I see you.'” Unexpectedly, the game allowed us to go deeper into each other’s worlds than ever before.
Rules of the ranking game
Choose an arbitrary, insignificant category – never rank friends by how hot they are or how much money you think they make.
List everyone’s names in order, from most to least, eg: “Friends in order of how much they spend on snacks at the theater: Claire, Lauren, Tim, Bert.”
Discuss and debate.
Only rank people who are present and participating in the game – don’t rank others when they’re not around.
Names have of course been changed!
