I hesitate to say this, but in my experience love and friendship show themselves most effectively when you have a personal conflict with each other. They develop by the mix resp. alteration of "harmony" and "disharmony".

First, people foreign to each other, start to harmonize by being friendly and social. Then, after a while, when talks and experiences with one another take place, there comes eventually disharmony into play. It's not a matter of "if" but of "when".

From my experience I can report that those online connections I had and which grew to a certain intensity, conflicts arose through this very developing of a more intense contact.

Love has a chance to grow between people when they can live out and allow each other being in conflict. With this, I mean the deepening of a relationship. Through online connections it's easy to maintain a certain distance.

At least for me, it takes quite a long time to feel being in a deep love towards an adult. I need all experiences with them, the full spectrum of a human relationship. So, for me, making the next step with a person online, would either be a very close working together environment and/or meeting each other offline on a regular basis. People need to test each other out, to feel one another with more than one sense.

It's very easy to find each other attractive online, to fall in love (which is a difference from a profound love), to become enthusiastic and inspired by others on the net. It's a piece of cake to use all these nice people online for becoming inspired and ignited. And even though all that is good and pretty it's not love, in my view. It's pleasure. Pleasure is very often confused with love. Love, described by me is an ideal which will be betrayed, trampled on, dismissed, smeared, withhold by all involved. You cannot, by any means, hold onto harmony without accepting it to be disharmonious.

To end my comment I would say that those humans in my life who found it worthwhile to argue with me, to disagree with me, to tell me some inconvenient words, are the ones I love the most. IF I have not broken off contact (or vice versa).

I hope I served the image you gave me here, Sam ;) LOL.
Still, you surprise me with finding words for my person. Thank you.

Though I will not name the names here to whom I felt conflicted or have broken contact with. It's easy to say with whom one feels in harmony. But inappropriate to say where it's the opposite. But I prefer saying also the things in person when sympathy or even love is involved.

Sincere greetings!

P.S. Now, everyone to whom I talked/engaged here on a somewhat intimate or frequent level, feel invited to come to Germany and let's meet if you ever set your foot into my country. I enjoy it very much to meet people through this connection.