Online friends are hard to maintain.
I would suggest to know them online but meet them IRL as soon as possible.
I don't know how to make friends and keep them but the greatest friendships I've had both online and IRL were when there was a common shared activity whether it was studying, sports, hobbies, work or gaming there was a shared project with shared experiences and when the project is somehow over, so is the friendship. Having friends just for the sake of having them to spend time and go out together to have fun and kill boredom only works when you're young when you're still exploring the world and you're cheerful and full of life who wants to share everything and talk about anything, sadly that's not gonna work when you're adult if its not backed by past memories and bond together. If you want to play a game online join a clan, join their forum, join their discords and play around them. If you want to do a sport or a hobby join a local Facebook group and hang out with them. Once you establish an IRL first approach take them out for dinner or a coffee, invite them to take a trip, take a walk, meet their friend, pet their pets, go to the cinema. The key is just making new memories together maybe its not gonna work but without even trying activities everything is gonna dry out. It's not the activity you do together that's important, it's your shared emotions and reactions. Even the best activity could mean nothing to you if done alone and something you do enjoy alone could be even greater doing with someone else. In my experience the loners are people that don't want to do anything, they have no interests, they are too scared or too anxious to do basically anything, they have no hobbies, they just feel lonely and that something is missing in their life but nothing is going to change because there's nothing to share. These are the difficult cases in which you don't know what to advise other than that these people must first find out what they want by making an effort to explore around.
After all that said the online set a sort of barrier against the sharing possibilities, it is mostly talking to death. It makes it really easy to start a friendship but really hard to maintain it. |