What's the point of friends if nobody wants to play?

Try finding someone who's really active. Before you friend them, ask them when they're online/available to play some games (if they'd like to). If your schedules match, then you can friend them and not have to worry about not having anyone to play. Also pay attention to what timezone they're in because that's also a huge factor in when they're available to play.

"Friends" on chess.com is absolutely useless. Almost like Facebook where you can have hundreds of "friends" but in reality you care about maybe 4 or 5% of them. 

If you go into Live Chess you can custom your own challenge or look at the open challenges to see anything you like.  That way you can make friends while playing.