Here’s a List of Every Type of Friend You Have in Your Life Right Now

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A little while back, I took it upon myself to compile a list of every annoying person you're friends with on Facebook. I did this for you. Anyway: in an attempt to inject some positivity back into the world, I have now made a list of everyone that you are friends with, period—although admittedly at least 60 percent of them are also annoying pricks. And on Facebook – JG

Us humans with our stupid monkey brains can't actually cope with having more than 150 stable social relationships, is the thing. That's according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, anyway. Here's some science about it. Because think about it: You can't, can you? Name your best friend. Name ten more good friends. That's it, you're probably done. Name every one of your Facebook friends. You cannot.

But, you know, friendship is a beacon of light in the dark abyss of existence. And it's a very natural, basic function; we've been learning how to do it since we were kids. Isn't that wild? Next time you're at a party with someone new and you go, "So, uh… do, uh… what are you getting up to this weekend?" just remember that a literal child is better at making instant-connection smalltalk than you. Every time you sweat because you have to make eye contact with someone you don't intimately know, just know that five-year-old children outperform you at this. Making friends is easy. Staying friends—with all the fucking text messaging, all the checking in, all the entire evenings of your life set aside to go to art galleries or pop-up taco vans with them, infinite taco vans, taco van after taco van after taco van, each taco more mediocre than the last—that's the hard part.

But then one of the true pleasures of having friends is categorizing them neatly into groups. Your best friends! Your one-bracket-out-of-the-best-friends-category-but-still-quite-good-friends friends! Those people you see annually and hate! Friends of all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds. Friends you're only friends with because they have a car and sometimes you really need a lift somewhere. Friends who have children and you never see again.

Anyway, here's every last one of your friends.

Come on, dude. You don't need someone explaining to you what a best friend is. It's your best friend. They are probably WhatsApping you right now. "You gotta read this list on VICE, man!" your best friend is saying. "It is so wrong! Again! I hate this guy!" That's you and your bestie: united in love, united in hate, always in touch via instant messaging.

There's an old friend of mine who—and there's no good way of saying this—who looks like Terry Nutkins died from a toxic shock-type reaction to anti-baldness medicine and somehow, in death, became incredibly hench. That's the good thing about old friends: You can say they look like Bodybuilder Zombie Nutkins, because you know the exact line you cross with them, the exact parameters of their sense of humor, the exact thing you can say before they flex their massive Nutkinesque arms and put you in a slightly-too-tight headlock. Essentially: if you haven't got someone in your life who you can comfortably call a "cunt" to their face, then you haven't really got any good friends, have you? You've just got people who Facebook you when they need the numbers to make a house party event look live.

There's that comfort level with old friends that is unparalleled, like climbing into a comfortable old gray sweatshirt and just wallowing around in it. And what's great is the upkeep with old friends is so much easier: occasionally text them the punchline from an old shared joke, or some memory of that time you got kicked out of a nightclub because another mutual friend took his trousers down to show two girls his leg tattoos, and boom: Your Pal-o-Meter is topped up.

Old friends are the bedrock on which your friendship mansion is built: nailed-on best men or maids of honor, they remember how fat you were at school (hella fat), how weird your first girlfriend or boyfriend's nose was (extremely weird), and why you're afraid of the concept of leprosy (particularly harrowing Blue Peter appeal). You have almost certainly pissed yourself in a sleeping bag while staying at their house. You should probably give them a call.

Oh, these trendy new friends with their trendy new ways! Those whirlwind first days of a new friendship. Because it's like dating, isn't it? Dating without erections or the covert handing of a 2-for-1 voucher to a waiter at Zizzi's. You're texting each other—"Should hang out again soon m8!"—you're round each other's houses. Your ex-trendy new friends are texting you, jealously. "Let's go shopping together!" your new pal says, and you do, you end up in Gap, watching them try on chinos. Harps play. Angels sing. You two go down the arcade and play fucking Time Crisis together. They introduce you to their existing mates. "Come over!" they say. "Party at mine!" And you find yourself stood in front of the mirror before you leave going: Why do I even care what I look like? I'm going to my mate's house to drink Breezers. You are going: Why did I spend 45 minutes doing my hair? I've lost my mind. And then you see them at the party, dancing with someone else, and your stomach drops through your body like a lift in a Japanese horror movie, and you put down the commemorative edition of your joint favorite film (S Club: Seeing Double), and you storm outside in tears, and you go: Actually I should probably have a word with myself, here. I'm meant to be an adult. Then you just end up relegating them to any one of these other fucking categories, and the cycle begins, anew, marching forever onwards.

Ah, the fragile human tie between two night-out friends. You know a night-out friend: you don't actually really know their surname, but they are in 80 percent of your selfies; you know their drinks order but you don't really know where they work; you have woken up in their bed or on their sofa, platonically naked, and covered in your own sick, on multiple occasions. And yet: can you imagine spending a Saturday afternoon with them? You cannot. In fact: Have you ever seen them in daylight? You sort of worry that one day you might be doing something semi-embarrassing—routine piss test, buying crotchless underwear, that sort of thing—and then you look up, and lo, who is it you are passing your beaker of (as it turns out) exceptionally infected piss to but your night-out friend, their eyes resolutely not on ecstasy, their work shirt grimly functional, and neither one of you quite knows what to do. "S–see you at Inferno's on Saturday?" But something has broken, something has changed. You can't do greasy tequilas with someone who has held a warm canister of your piss. You cannot watch someone twerk when you know they work for Waterstone's. "No," you think, getting a taxi home, judderingly sober. "Can't see them again."

Sex friends are great because you get to have sex with them but they are also the worst because you're always too confused to know whether hand-holding or communal breakfast is weird. Can you link arms when you walk down the street, or is that like kissing a prostitute? Like, yes: The sex is explosive, orgasms glitter through your body like fireworks, but you don't really know if you're allowed to leave a toothbrush over so you have to brush your teeth with just a load of toothpaste and your finger. It's confusing, isn't it? On one hand: You're getting it, on the regs. You're getting so hellaciously nailed it's not even fun any more. On the other hand: cavities are bad. Maybe it's time you had a chat.

"Do u want to go to gig," the text says. You get this text every six months, like clockwork. "Gig happening. Do u want to go." And so you say yes, to this friend, because you do want to go gig—it is Arcade Fire, or one of those bands you like, you know the ones—and then the long slow dance of logistics unfurl. "Got 2 x tickets, can u send me money." And you ask this friend how much money, and they always say "$100." Can you PayPal it to them? You cannot PayPal it to them, because it is the Year of Our Lord 2015 and somehow they have gone through life without buying anything on eBay. You phone the bank. You transfer the money. You do not see them for six months until the gig is actually happening.

I mean you have forgotten about the gig, is the thing. Because this friend is not a regular friend: This is a gig friend. You actually can't remember where you met this person and you can't imagine an opportunity to bump them from your friend roster, so they are there, on the periphery, swaying slowly in time with an Arcade Fire song. You wore a band T-shirt to the gig. They did not. You meet in a pub next to the venue beforehand and you both drink a pint in silence. "Seen any good gigs lately?" your gig friend asks you. You have to admit that you have not. They wince with empty disappointment. You do not read Pitchfork as often as they read Pitchfork. You do not read popular youth-centric music blog Noisey. Or Thump, which is also a website. "So what," your gig friend says, "what have you been up to?"

Over on popular youth-centric music blog Noisey: Which Top Lad Said It – Finchy from The Office, or Catfish and the Bottlemen?

Do you ever get this with someone so boring—someone so singularly focused, the kind of person who buys records in lieu of having a personality—do you ever get this with someone you have one, thin strand of shared reality with, that when they ask you a straight-up question like "What have you been up to for the last six months," you cannot answer it? Your brain frets at the edges. I mean come on, you had a pregnancy scare. You moved flat. You had both of your legs taken off at the knee in that motorcycle accident, remember. And you look at this person in front of you, and you go: Oh not much, really. They do not mention your tin legs. I mean, not much has been going on. All that rehab, all that physical therapy. All those agonizing first steps on the frayed bones of your past. We should probably make a move to get in early, you know how those queues get. And you do, both queuing in silence, checking your respective phones, begrudgingly paying $10 a throw for a gig pint, dancing emotionlessly, walking home in a separate direction from your gig friend even though they live in the same direction, doubling back on yourself 25 minutes later when you are sure the coast is clear, just hoping to get away from them for six sweet little months until they text you again about Sad Boys.

"What?" they say, coming back from the bar with a single pint and change from a tenner. "What, you mean you two wanted one?" These men are always called "Shawn." Always. "Yes, Shawn," you say, pointing at your empty glass. "We obviously fucking wanted one." And he turns on his heels and rolls his eyes, making a "Well fine, if you're going to be like that about it, I guess I'll go back to the bar" motion with his arms—even though this is all his fault, even though this is one of the most basic social conventions he has fucked up by coming back with a pint of mild and a single packet of peanuts grasped between his teeth, like: even a monkey can buy a round—and secretly, in your head, in ink instead of pencil, you cross him firmly out of your top 150. When he comes back he does not share his peanuts.

"Hiya," the text says from you friend who is most likely Australian. "Going to be in [CITY WHERE YOU LIVE] for a few days. Can I crash with you?" And you are young and you are foolish and you have never been hurt before, and so you say: "Yes." You say: "Yes, that won't be inconvenient to me at all." Only there is something hardwired into the brain of people who do not pay for their accommodation that makes it so they need to take a 45-minute shower at scientifically the most inconvenient time for you possible. They say things like, "I ate all those Peperami out the fridge. They were for the house, right?" And you are like—you have taken a 90-minute bus journey from work, and you have had a bad day, and you have been rained on, and all you want and all you have been craving is a sweet, salty-hot chew on a Peperami when you get in, and you sprint to the fridge and find nothing—and you say something like, "No, that's fine." And then you go and make tea and your friend is like: "Oh, I made a lot of tea." There is a towering pile of teabags on your work surface, on the side. There is that tiny bit of milk in the milk bottle that people leave to try to distract you from the fact that they used all the milk. "I made, like, all the tea. Are we going out? Where are you taking me out?" And you think—quietly at first, but it gets louder—and you think: I am the only one who knows he is here. I could kill him right now with a knife and nobody would ever know.

Hey, take some advice from a wizened old man who is spinning like a top towards the yawning abyss of death: if one of your friends is good at cooking, never let them go. Never let them go. Because here's how you decide whether you like someone and want to hang out with them, at various different ages:

My God and my Christ, you do not know true joy until you've gone round to your mates' house and they have cooked you a pie. Do you know how much fucking hassle it is to cook a pie? You have to fold fat into flour with an icy cold spoon. You have to lovingly cook an entire casserole just for the filling. You have to roll stuff out and dust it and roll it again. You have to buy a special pie tin. You need to make cheesy mash. Has anyone ever made a pie for you? It's like an all-day event. And then they put a big slice down in front of you, and you go: Cheers, I guess. You drink all the wine you bought and go: What's the situation with the pie? Is there any more pie? After 45 minutes in their presence, you go: Welp, probably got to make my way home now. Got to do some damage to the toilet pan with this pie. Fact: Pie only tastes better in your mouth the more you age. If any of your friends offer to cook you anything—a roast, a pie, some fucking buns—hug them tightly and never let them go.

"Do you remember the fun we had?" they say, over single pints of beer. "Yes," you reply. "I remember that one time we had fun." "Haha," they say. "Wow. Have you heard from [MUTUAL FRIEND] lately?" You have not. "How about [MUTUAL FRIEND]?" You have not. "Did you hear [MUTUAL FRIEND] had a baby?" You heard it but you didn't care. "Remember the fun we had?" You do not remember the fun. The fun is a distant memory now, dwindling down to a fine point. The fun of your past is earth and you are reversing through space past Venus. You have had more fun since and you will have more fun again and both instances of fun have entirely eclipsed your previous benchmark of fun. You do not need to go back and remember the bad haircut you had and all the rice you ate in halls. You do not need to remember that study abroad student who waved a big knife around when the washing up got too bad. That is something you want to actively unremember. And you feel yourself, floating distantly away, on a breeze in the night sky, away from your memories and away from your past, away from that night you bought two-for-$10 cocktail jugs and ended up falling over and splitting both your palms open in a piss-soaked men's urinal, crying—and you were crying, you were weeping—crying at your bloody, pissy hands, going "DO I HAVE AIDS, NOW?" screaming, "DO I HAVE PISS-AIDS?" holding on with a fragile bleeding human sadness to a trainee doctor whose name you cannot remember. You did not have piss-AIDS. And then that voice opposite you chimes in, tugging you back from the memory hole into which you were drifting: "God, we should go back there, for one weekend. Old time's sake." And you look at the wrinkles on their face and their decent adult haircut and the sad quiet note playing behind their eyes that says 'I still pass for 21, right? I still pass as young?' and you lean close and you whisper: no.

I mean come on Jesus Christ I am clearly #149 on your 150-strong friend list stop pretending you like me enough to spend a solid hour in my company.

You'll have these: One day, you'll realize, you've never been alone in a room with this person even though they've been there, at the edges of your vision, for years. You always see them at parties. Always smiling and leaning into group conversations. And then, one day, everyone goes outside to smoke or get drinks or go home, and it's just you two, in a room, and there is a lull in the music, and suddenly—and you didn't even know it—suddenly you don't like this person. Because you know nothing about them. And then you look into their eyes – deep, familiar, animal-like eyes—and you forget entirely how to make friends. It is too late to make friends. This is the sound you make: Euhhhhhh? They look at you. You look at them. You do not like each other, and yet you are friends. You have at least five of these, and you might have ten. If you don't have one: You are someone else's.

Here are some things rich friends say: "No, fuck that, let's get a cab. I'm not fucking waiting for a fucking bus"; "God this Wetherspoons is like inhaling a warm bucket of turds, I'm taking us to a champagne bar"; [ SOUND OF SOMEONE INHALING SOME VERY EXPENSIVE COCAINE AND THEN OFFERING SOME TO YOU] "Ahh, gak." But sometimes they go missing for a really long time with one of those well-bred pedigree posh people who you will never, never have sex with, and you are milling around some posh person party where everyone is wearing $10,000 cream tuxedos and weird masks, and then a waiter comes up to you with a bill—the bill is served on a silver tray, is how expensive this is going to be—and you have to stand outside in the rain on the phone to NatWest asking to extend your overdraft so you can buy these three peach bellinis that somehow cost $170 while your rich friend is off somewhere having honking loud rich person sex on some pillows that cost more than your house.

"OH WEY OH WEY," your pisshead mate is saying. You are balancing six pints across two hands. "OH WEY OH WEY, OH WEY OH WEY, OH WEY—" and then they pause, and look at you. "Feeling hot," you say. You're still holding the pints. "Feeling hot, hot, hot." They shout "WEYYYY!" again and flip the pints into your face. It's 20 minutes until you can get served again at the bar. Three separate people ask you if you've pissed yourself. "Do you really think," you say, "do you really think that I piss out six pints of urine at a time?" They stare at your clothing. "Do you really think I piss up as well as down? Do you really think I was moving my dick in a frenetic and pendulous north-to-south motion while I was taking that last piss just then?" When you get back to the table your mates have all been kicked out for smuggling in cans of Grolsch and not even pouring them into pint glasses before drinking them. Ah, pisshead mates: so much fun.

A man and a van only costs $30 an hour and doesn't require the flimsy pretext of friendship, Shelley.

For some reason there are some people who you end up outside in the smoking area of some house party with at 5 AM, hunkered on a doorstep in that way that moms say gives you piles, and you both have your arms huddled around in front of your knees, and they go—they say something innocuous, like, "So, how's it going? Been ages since I've seen you"—and you suddenly break and get all serious—you go on and on about that leg accident you had, how you can't sleep any more without the revving of a motorcycle engine screaming in your ears, how you miss the way your feet feel in slippers—and they just quietly nod and say "ahuh" and "ahum," and then they go: Hey, mate, and give you a big weird one-armed hug, and you walk away – clinking, remember, on your robo-legs – you walk away as the sun rises in the east and the birds flock into the sky, and you go: Hold on. You go: I don't even know that fucker's name.

Hard friends, you think, are good: because look at you, right? It's a wonder you don't get beaten up more. You need hard friends for the next time someone lunges at you for your bad opinions, or the next time you misjudge the mood of a pub and legitimately say "totes." But truly hard friends have a certain soft fragility inside them, and before they die for your cause, you need to show them that they are actually your mate. Like, yes: They might be 80 percent ready to bottle someone at literally any given minute of the day, but you need to check in with them a minimum of once a week before they turn that misplaced, clumsy brutality on you. I once spent an hour of my life at a bar cornered by a 6'5" bloke I'd only otherwise met twice who was on the verge of tears because I hadn't accepted his Facebook request. Like, I think if I had said: "I hate you, mate. You look like a big prawn," he would have sobbed. Is it worth the protection having him around gives me? It is not. Do I have to deal with a lot of Farmville requests and angry updates about the parking situation outside ASDA ("How many fukin ppl what park disabled spaces? no?")? Yes I do. Life is about giving and taking, and hard mates are rarely worth the tug 'n' pull. Plus: way more likely to, for absolutely no reason, step on your head.

Thing with "work friends"—and I wouldn't know, because I work at VICE, and everyone keeps saying to me, "No, we don—we definitely don't hang around at the pub. No, we don't all sneak out when you've left and congregate together to laugh at you behind your back. Nobody is friends here, Joel. Go home."—but the thing with work friends is they are a grey-to-black spectrum that goes from "someone you nod at in corridors" through "person you're pretty sure you spoke to at the Christmas party and now have to make small talk with in the kitchen while waiting for the kettle to boil" to "people you actually think are alright." And it's tough, because there's always the doubt in your mind: Do I actually like this person?, your mind is saying, Or am I just really desperate for the warmth of human company, and also someone to go eat lunch with? You just don't know. Are you friends? Or do you both just hate the same printer? You don't know. You'll never know. Work friends: the doubt that never goes away.

The reason sports were invented is to give boyfriends something to talk about with the boy mates of their new girlfriends. That is all sports are. "So, what about that Rooney, eh?" every man in Britain has said at some point or another, staring at a screen mounted high in the corner of a busy pub, while a man slowly chewing gum and crossing his arms watches rapt at a Norwich game. "Yes," the other man will say. "Left peg." And then the new girlfriend will turn and say: I cannot believe how well you two are getting along! And then she will say: You two should be friends! And then, later, alone together and after the sex has happened, she will go: Kent wants you to be his best man and you are like Kent? and she is like Yes and you are like Fucking REALLY? and she is like Yes, he doesn't have any other friends, and then you realize you have been used: that you are not really in love, you have just been seduced into being this man's best friend because his girlfriend is best friends with your girlfriend, and you are stuck with him forever now, and in the best man's speech you start: "If there's one thing I know about Kent, it's that he likes football!" and then you just sit down again, and his dad shakes your hand and says it's the best speech he's ever seen and/or heard.

I mean, for girls it's different. All a girl needs to do to adhere herself to a group of boys is to quickly drink one beer and burp. They will all then cheer and someone called Lee will pronounce that she is an "honorary lad." He has a trophy. Does he always carry a trophy around with him? Does Lee constantly have a trophy on hand for these moments? The point is: Men are essentially chimps and drinking beer is their version of bum sniffing. But it's still a special ordeal new girlfriends have to go through.

The thing about the strata of friends who are friends with your boyfriend or your girlfriend is that they are changeable: When you dump or get dumped, you will lose 30 friends in an instant. They will ebb and they will flow. But there will always be a silent, gum-chewing man called Kent—the kind of man who "doesn't like texting" so just phones you when he's bored, as though phoning people on the phone isn't a sign of mania—and he will always be your friend, and he will never let you go, ever, and he will wait outside your house, and he will ask you what you are doing on Sunday, and he is always there, everywhere you pivot, everywhere you look, every day, forever.

12:43:03: yo sup what up sup yo u wanna hang out today
12:43:47: yes good that sounds fun
12:43:48: yo ok cool meet at fitness 1st in like one minutes time?
12:43:59: what
12:44:00: yeah it's cool we will lift weight and talk in strained voices while we lift weights and I will run like literally 15 miles on a treadmill while you just sit on a rowing machine drinking one of those weird little triangular paper cups of water and panting like an exhausted dying dog
12:44:21: have you heard of pubs. have you heard of cafes.
12:44:22: yo I am outside your house already somehow! even though I live a 45 minute drive away! I am wearing a vest today
12:44:37: please
12:44:38: I bought you a protein shake! we are going to have some fun today while lifting things up and sweating!
12:44:48: please no

You ever been in a social situation—a party, you know, a big fun meet up at a pub, hanging outside work while you wait for the fire alarm to stop going off—and you see someone you know from a distance and they give you a tight little smile and then turn to the person they are talking to like: no. You ever get that? Those people are mad at you. And they are always mad at you for some perceived slight, rather than a real reason. You forgot to wish them happy birthday on Facebook even though you said it in real life with your mouth, that sort of thing. You didn't invite them to something. You said their grandma is "an extremely old and smelly-ass old bitch" and that the biscuits she made were "exceptionally shitty." That sort of thing.

I have a theory, and it is five people I know are mad at me, constantly. The people who are mad at me change, but they switch in and out like K'Nex pieces: someone is mad, then their anger cools because it was never based on anything anyway, and then someone else gets mad. In and out, like a sewage pipe, a constant energy of anger. Turds flowing into the sea. That is my theory, and if you don't like it, you just became one of the five.

Oh, you know the ones. They do those things. You know. Those things you don't like. Dreadful, those ones. Ughhhh, right? The worst.

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