Consider the following pandas:

df1:

user_id create_at
0   1   2023-01-01
1   1   2023-01-02
2   2   2023-01-01
3   2   2023-01-03
4   2   2023-01-05

df2:

user_id withdrawal_request_date
0   1   2023-01-03
1   2   2023-01-02
2   3   2023-01-01

I want to do a merge_asof BUT when I do, I lose the user with user_id=3. He is not in df1 so I lose him as you see below:

pd.merge_asof(df1.sort_values('create_at'), 
              df2.sort_values('withdrawal_request_date'), 
              by = 'user_id', 
              left_on = 'create_at', 
              right_on = 'withdrawal_request_date', 
              direction = 'forward')

user_id create_at   withdrawal_request_date
0   1   2023-01-01  2023-01-03
1   2   2023-01-01  2023-01-02
2   1   2023-01-02  2023-01-03
3   2   2023-01-03  NaT
4   2   2023-01-05  NaT

However, I would like to keep him in the final dataframe.
NOTE that my dataset is huge with thousands of users each doing a lot of activity so doing something like outer joins will not work here.

Any ideas?

DATA

df1 = pd.DataFrame({
    'user_id': [1, 1, 2, 2, 2],
    'create_at': pd.to_datetime(['2023-01-01', '2023-01-02', '2023-01-01', '2023-01-03', '2023-01-05'])
})

df2 = pd.DataFrame({
    'user_id': [1, 2, 3],
    'withdrawal_request_date': pd.to_datetime(['2023-01-03', '2023-01-02', '2023-01-01'])
})