If you can keep your diary empty when all about you are filling theirs and blaming it on work, if you can trust yourself to stay single but make allowance for the couples all around; if you can wait to have a baby, or make plans without an hour’s notice, if you can afford to go for dinner, and still haven’t got the money for a one-bedroom flat in a newly gentrified area: yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, but you’ll need friends, my girl.

Nobody warned me that my early 30s would be ushered in with the crack of an invisible starting gun; that all around me the women I spent years eating, dressing, dancing and making an exhibition of myself with would get busy. Proper jobs, babies, deposits, older parents, relationships, actual hobbies and hour-long commutes were a kick in the nads to our social life. Suddenly, if you wanted to hang out, you had to “pencil it in”, even though none of us have owned pencils since Year 9 maths. Which means, more often than anyone admits, you find yourself all gussied up with no one to see.

In 2014, a study published by the Office for National Statistics ranked Britain as the loneliest nation in the European Union; only 58.4% of Britons said they knew people in their community well; we came 26th out of 28 countries for having someone we felt we could turn to in a crisis; and in a 2013 study by into wellbeing found that across all age groups, women reported feeling lonely more often than men. The 90s fetishised friendship through shows like Friends, This Life, and even, dare I say it, Sex and the City, which taught us that operating in a shoal of mates was the natural, inevitable state. But, as anyone who has ever taken to Facebook to ask 576 thumbs with profile photos if they fancy going to see this film tonight knows, sometimes friends are hard to find.

Step forward Hey! VINA. Hey VINA! is a new app that, in their own sphincter-crunching words, “empowers women to tap into the power of their extended network to make new connections in the real world”. This, for those of you who don’t speak fluent social media, basically means using your phone to pluck real life friends out of the muddy puddle we call People On The Internet. It would be too easy to sneer at such an idea – to throw our smart claws up in the air in horror at the sheer crassness of it all. But, there but for the grace of circumstance go us all.

Olivia Jane Poole co-created Hey! VINA after she moved to San Francisco to work as a tech entrepreneur. New to town, she signed up for a dating site and tried to use it to make female friends. Ours is an internet generation and so, as our foremothers looked to libraries, local shops, playgroups and cafes for friends, so we look to our various devices. It doesn’t surprise or disappoint me in any way that women like Poole are starting to use apps to make friends; we’re already using apps to find directions, shop for food, share photos, track our periods, rent houses and listen to the radio.

Part of the way Hey VINA! works is that members “take profile quizzes to get introduced to others with compatible interests, personalities, and lifestyles”. I love quizzes. Like anyone who grew up in the 90s I love answering mostly Bs to discover that I am an “outdoorsy person”. This is basically Sugar magazine made digital. “Maybe you’re a new mom, or you’re trying out Paleo and training for a marathon, or you’re single and need a fantastic wing-lady,” suggests the Hey VINA! website. Not fucking likely pal, but I do like the idea of meeting someone to go for a run with on a bright, cold Thursday morning. I do admire people who will reach out to new potential friends with whom to visit galleries. And it would have been great to have found a group of enthusiastic, confident, text message-analysing, late-night pudding people to go out with or discuss dates with, as my friends fell in love around me and dropped like flies.

After all, we are far more romantic with our friends than our partners. It is with my friends that I have gone on picnics, had late-night soul-bearing chats, spent sun-drenched holidays or rain-lashed long weekends. It is with friends that I have shared books, cold swims and brilliant secrets. It is when friends come round that I light candles, cook proper meals, wear nice clothes or hide the dirty forks in the oven so the kitchen looks nice. Because they are the ones that notice, the ones that appreciate it. The people you hook up with on Tinder are simply pleased to see that you have an open and working mouth – it’s your friends that care. And so to find yourself low on friends can feel a lot like the loneliness of lost love.

Loneliness isn’t something that only happens to older people. In fact, loneliness isn’t something that happens to other people at all. It follows us around like a heartbeat – sometimes unnoticed, sometimes impossible to ignore. It can come to anyone, given the circumstances.

And it is the best of us who take measures to meet new people. Of course you may not strike up an instant repartee with the women you meet through apps like Hey! VINA. But at least you’re doing something. Let’s not sneer at those using the internet to find pals instead of just a potential mate. Let us, instead, champion the companion. After all, some of us are just here to make friends.