Hello @tiffywiffy76 and welcome to our friendly King Community. This seems to be a recurring problem. If you are playing via King.com - you need to physically enter your friends' emails so they are part of your 'friends', but if you play thru Facebook - your Facebook friends should be part of your friends who can send you lives. My problem was most of my friends weren't actively playing Candy Crush Friends so I went to a CCF Facebook group and looked for some people who played the game and added them as friends and now I get lives sometimes from them. You can also contact any of your friends that you know play the game and ask them to please send you lives.
That reply didn’t help, I as well am asking my friends for lives and I don’t receive it from them and they say they are sending me and they can receive mine lives sent to them , not fair