I recently started playing and reached Emerald 3 losing all games while most of my friends are in bronze or silver and they say I don't belong here?

I joined league a few months ago because my friends were encouraging me to play it before arcane came out and so I leveled up my account mostly against bots and did a couple games or so with them but I mostly played alone. Now that the season was about to end I came back and did some normals with them to unlock ranked and played one solo ranked and my first 5 flex games alone and I lost them all and got placed in Emerald 3. My friends are mostly bronze/silver and unranked and they are saying that it's not fair I got this rank because I don't play for it and lost all my flex games and that I don't know the game well enough to be in emerald 3. I don't understand either, I'm really new to the game and although I played other mobas like Smite and Dota I still know very little about league but how is it my fault the game says I am a rank that my friends say I'm not? I do want to play more flex now in the new season but they are saying that my rank will get lower and I won't be Emerald anymore. Is this true?