Have you dumped your Zoom group yet? If not, it’s probably only a matter of time.

Our virtual social lives are drying up. Zoom, Houseparty and other platforms that were a lifeline during the Covid-19 lockdowns now feel like a chore. Virtual gatherings are harder to schedule. The limitations are getting tougher to tolerate. Even long-lost friends who reconnected during the pandemic have lost interest in video chatting.

Zoom most certainly will continue as a workplace tool, but for socializing, “I think people will be ditching Zoom in droves,” predicts Richard Slatcher, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia. As the world opens up, virtual gatherings are proving no match for ones in real life.

In an April survey of 2,000 American adults conducted a year ago by the Siena College Research Institute, 60% said they had used video chat to talk with friends and family during the prior week. In April 2021, the share had dropped to 36%, according to Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, who commissioned the two surveys.

“We should keep in touch with our close friends, our best friends from college and high school. It is good for us,” Dr. Hall says. But we don’t.

During the pandemic, he reconnected on Zoom with five of his University of Southern California fraternity brothers—some of his best buddies who hadn’t been together since the wedding of one 13 years ago. The two-hour reunion was cathartic. The friends picked up right where they left off, telling old jokes and teasing one member about his rambling stories. “I laughed so hard. It was the best time ever,” he says. “We all knew it was great, and we agreed to meet again. And it never happened again.”

Dr. Hall says he wasn’t surprised. “The reality of relationships is that matching the desired amount of closeness and frequency is hard,” he says. After the reunion, he emailed some pictures to the group. One fraternity brother shared a photo of the pasta dish he’d been making at the time. The emails petered out.

Gatherings of old friends take work, an organizer and aligned priorities. In this case, the organizer got a new job and his life became chaotic. At the time of the Zoom, “we were all lonely compared to our old lives—and a whole lot less busy,” Dr. Hall says.

Some groups break up because they get to be just too much zoom. At the start of the pandemic, Rocky Lachman was sheltering alone in New York. “We were in such a dark period. I was focused on what I needed to do to get through,” says Ms. Lachman, marketing head at Tribeca Venture Partners, a venture capital firm. She participated in all available online events—coffees, cocktails, brunch, dinner, birthday parties, reunions, funerals and fundraisers, she says. She joined a book club, a running class, a quarterly girls group, Zooming sometimes seven days a week.

When she organized a bi-weekly movie night with a friend she felt pressure to chat through the shows to prove she was paying attention. By then, her work, board meetings, church, and all activities were virtual. Movie night “felt like the same activity—being stuck to a screen,” she says. “I began to feel Zoom burnout and then Zoom guilt,” she says.

She began opting for less Zoom and more socially distanced walks in the park. Lately, she has been dramatically curtailing her virtual life. When one of her college friends asked whether she would attend their informal virtual reunion, she says “I just couldn’t have another Zoom.” She asked her friend to let her know how it went.

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No matter how good we get at Zoom, it’s no substitute for the real thing. It’s harder and not as spontaneous. “Face-to-face communication is spatial. People maintain interpersonal distance, turn their heads to signal attention, and choose seating arrangements that reflect context, status, familiarity, turn taking, and all sorts of signals that make for great communication,” says Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford University. “Humans have evolved relying on these spatial cues, and we just don’t get them online.”

Megan Chiramal, an Atlanta-based client-services specialist for an investment management firm, is relieved that things are re-opening. She had attended virtual events organized by her exercise studio. She socialized virtually with professional friends at events like an online chocolate tasting. But she has noticed a drop-off in virtual attendance. A game night with local friends petered out. Some virtual social events began to feel like obligations. “I can now say I have something else I have to do,” she says. She’s considering dropping her paid subscription to Zoom.

Some virtual groups will survive and continue. Jeff Hancock, another Stanford professor, expects most Zoom social life will decay rapidly with the exception of meetings focused on activities and not conversation. He and his brother in Vancouver plan to continue Zoom cooking a fancy Italian dinner together once a month. The one Zoom Ms. Lachman knows she will continue is a quarterly gathering with two friends who served with her on a board before moving away during the pandemic. When together, they can be themselves, she says. She once attended one in a robe; one of her friends was folding laundry. “If you’re excited about something you will show up to it,” she says.

Virtual gatherings of old friends like Dr. Hall’s will be harder to maintain, researchers say. “People are going to have to fight like hell to keep those things going,” Dr. Hall says. “It’s hard to do. You can’t make people commit to your communication patterns.”

Long-distance friends are often your closest friends because you are bonded by shared history, says Rebecca Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, but they often aren’t the ones you spend the most time with. She calls this the old friend paradox. You may gravitate to them in times of stress, but that doesn’t mean they share your current interests, political views or—in her case—fascination with the Grateful Dead. A virtual gathering of Deadheads that came together during the pandemic is the one Zoom group she’s not quitting.

Write to Betsy Morris at betsy.morris@wsj.com