After a fun, intimate evening spent with friends, it’s inevitable that you’ll get home and immediately worry that they don’t like you anymore. Did you talk too much? Did you offend them without realizing it? In the time it takes for you to get home, it’s likely that you’ll have convinced yourself that none of your friends ever want to see your stupid face again. If you find yourself in this situation, don’t worry. Simply grab a phone and follow these steps.

Open With Something Small

The first step in ensuring your friends haven’t stopped liking you since dinner is by checking to see if they’ll still respond to your texts. Shoot a casual, open-ended question to your group chat, just to be sure they haven’t all unanimously decided to start ignoring you. Make a callback to a joke someone said at dinner! Or, stick with something as basic as “had fun tonight!”. If they respond to this, you can rest easy knowing that they haven’t disowned you because you made a bad joke about hors d’oeuvres at dinner.

Individualize Your Messages

If you want to be completely sure your friends didn’t stop hating you after you hugged and got in your separate Lyfts, a group chat just won’t cut it. You’ll have to send specifically catered texts to each friend you interacted with that night. A positive response from each of them should assuage your concerns, at least for a few hours until you start reading into their messages too deeply.

Plan Another Hangout

Your friends continuing to respond to your messages is a good sign, but there’s always a chance they’re simply masking their newfound irritation with you over the phone. To be totally positive everyone still likes you, you’ll want to arrange another hangout, stat. Suggest you all go out to see a movie soon! If they say yes, you can be almost totally sure they’ve forgotten that moment at dinner when you said you didn’t know who Dan Quayle was. You’re not dumb!

Make Sure Your Phone Volume Is Turned Up

Let’s be real: it’s late! If your friends aren’t responding, it’s probably because they’re in bed, not because they regret ever asking you to hang out with them! Keep your phone volume on loud, so the second a friendly text comes through, you can alleviate your anxieties and finally get some sleep.

If you follow these steps, we guarantee you’ll spend almost none of your time worrying if your friends still like you. This way, your time can be spent on more pressing matters, like is your boss planning on firing you, and does your barista think you’re weird! Happy texting!