A few years ago, most if not all of my friends were single. On any given weeknight, I'd meet with one or five of them for a drink and we'd swap stories about bad dates, bad sex, and bad crushes who refused to give us the time of day.

We all have that one friend who's insufferable on social media. If you're tired of seeing your Instagram feed cluttered with annoying memes, gloating status updates, or endless selfies, the solution seems obvious: Unfollow them. If only it were that simple.

Cancelling social plans is the ultimate in self-gratification -- first you got high off the plans, then you got high off the freedom. But sometimes you leave the other person annoyed and betrayed. So whenever you cancel on someone, make sure to immediately make new plans with them, says redditor DevotedlyHopeless in a post on /r/LifeProTips. Here are some more tactics for cancelling without being a flake.

Life throws a lot of unpleasant experiences our way - such as deaths in the family, nasty breakups, or agonising injuries - but a good friend can always help us pull through. This trick will remind you to be a good friend long after the initial shock of a traumatic event has faded away.

This week we have a man with a female best friend, but his girlfriend is getting jealous.

You probably know that adding people to your inner circle takes time, but how much time it actually takes to go from strangers to buddies has been somewhat of a mystery -- until now. A new study suggests you need to spend at least 90 hours with someone before they consider you a real friend.

Meeting new people and making good friends gets harder as you get older. You get less adventurous, fall into comfortable routines with significant others, and you don't have school to force you to interact with different groups of people any more. But if you have at least one friend, you do have an easy option for finding some fresh faces to spend time with.

Friends make you happy and healthy, and they will be there for you when the rain starts to pour. But how many of them do you need? Turns out the show Friends had the science all figured out.

You have problems, I have advice. This advice isn't sugar-coated - in fact, it's sugar-free, and may even be a little bitter. Welcome to Tough Love.

A few years ago an ex-boyfriend of mine got married. Our breakup was amicable and we both stayed friends with a lot of the same people. That meant when it came time for his wedding weekend, my Facebook feed was flooded with pictures of his rehearsal dinner, wedding and reception. Yes, I was happy for him, but not happy enough I wanted to see (literally) a thousand pictures of the festive event I wasn't a part of.

There's something magical about cancelling plans last minute - yes, I've heard the John Mulaney joke. You instantly get to do whatever you want and not feel beholden to anyone. True freedom is only a shameful text away. But flaking out is a slippery slope that can lead to a detrimental, and fairly rude, habit. Here's why you get such a rush of relief when your evening suddenly frees up, and how to stop yourself from becoming the person who always bails.

Have you ever had a moment of connection with a stranger? I'm not talking about a romantic or sexual connection (though those are nice too), but more of a quick smile as you pass on the street, or a one-off joke shared while waiting in the grocery-store line, or some other brief, shared experience that made you feel that stranger was actually special and could have, in other circumstances, been a friend? I love those moments, which are few and far between, because they make me feel like the universe of potential friends is bigger than I'd thought. I've always wondered why those moments happen - why they happen with one person and not another, or at one time and not another.

You talked about your plans with your friends face to face, you made a Facebook event page and invited them - but people still seem to flake out on you. What gives? Well, you're still not making it easy enough for them.

You have problems, I have advice. This advice isn't sugar-coated - in fact, it's sugar-free, and may even be a little bitter. Welcome to Tough Love.

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker's weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and how you can use its waters to reflect on and improve your life.

Workplaces are funny little ecosystems. You spend all your time working and developing complex relationships with everyone from the security guard to your shared desk mate, but occasionally, these fragile work friendships can go south.

Davy Crockett is an American folk hero of mythic proportions, and was greatly popularised during the '50s and '60s thanks to Disney's TV miniseries and major motion pictures. But Crockett was a very real person in history, and he had a lot of wisdom to share.

You have problems, I have advice. This advice isn't sugar-coated -- in fact, it's sugar-free, and may even be a little bitter. Welcome to Tough Love.

Everyone does not have more friends than you, even though, as a study at UBC Vancouver indicated, plenty of people believe their friends all have more friends. Everyone is not going to parties you're not invited to, meeting a wide array of people across all backgrounds and slices of life, who come together in a rich tapestry of social circles that rivals the opening titles of Sesame Street.