In an attempt to satisfy that old, familiar empty feeling, you know, that gaping hole in your soul that no amount of booze, drugs, or cheese will ever fill, you’ve chosen to make friends. Congratulations.

Now you need to work to maintain those tenuous ties to reality. Friendship requires a lot more than accepting a Facebook request. Here’s how to manage that nightmare should you be so lucky:

1. Keep in touch.

Keeping in touch is the lifeblood of a healthy friendship.

However, if you’re like me, most of the time you can’t even bring yourself to wish a friend “happy birthday” on Facebook let alone text the message. Somehow both feel cheap even when you try to spice them up with a series of slutty vegetable emojis or Googled images of cute puppies or even John Wayne Gacy. And you can forget calling friends. Phone calls are only made to blood relatives for the sole purpose of retrieving debt.

If it were up to me, it would be enough to be a good pen pal, like the Korean one I had in elementary school. For every letter I wrote, I could depend on her to respond in kind with Hello Kitty stationary and stickers, or an assortment of gently used erasers.

Unfortunately, having friends isn’t about collecting cute imports; it’s about having a few people in the world who actually think about you from time to time, even if it’s just to think “I haven’t heard from that bitch in six months.”

The least you can do is check in. Send a text a week. Make plans for a lunch you’ll never eat. It’s important to let your friends know you’re thinking about them too.

2. Say “yes.”

I’ve never had trouble saying “no” to a social call. It’s not that I don’t like socializing. Believe me, I love to gossip about people that have one hundred percent zero bearing on my life just as much as everyone else does.

But here’s the thing: my innate sense of confidence was robbed from me by a pack of kids in Umbro soccer shorts during the late 90's. Now, even as a mostly well-adjusted grown-up, sometimes I still think that when anyone shows interest in me it must be because they need someone to humiliate during this perpetual dodge ball game called life.

When you make friends, you have to say “yes” to them because these people actually like you in spite of that box of feelings you’ve buried deep inside. The box labeled “Assorted Humiliations Ages 9 to 32” bearing locks with names like “Six Flags and the Crimson Wave Pool” and “School Dancing With Myself.”

3. Meet each other half way.

I was at the gym when I spotted a friend of mine from atop my sweaty post in a crowded row of treadmills. We were still in that new friend stage: you know, the one where you’ve been sharing an office for six months and have cried in front of each other while swapping stories about your mothers?

I kept an eye on my friend as she swung back and forth on the elliptical machine a few rows in front of me, keeping my other eye on one of the three screens tuned into Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I’d seen the episode before, but I’d never spoken to my friend outside of the office. To be honest, I knew more about tracking a perp through the sex offender registry with nothing more than a whisper’s worth of semen than I did about being friends as an adult.

A few days later, while feeling particularly unmoored of shame, I confessed. She looked at me the way Ice-T looks at particularly tight-lipped witnesses, but she also insisted that we trade phone numbers and use them on a semi-regular basis.

I last texted her two weeks ago: “Everything is a hassle these days. I’d pay someone to pee for me.”