I find this really interesting, as it's a meme that I think most adults still share. I'm interpreting your use of 'natural' as meaning something like 'meeting someone by some degree of chance, in-person, in a scenario where finding a relationship is not, nominally at least, the primary reason for being there.

Looking to meet complete strangers on the internet with the intention of starting a relationship vs looking to meet complete strangers in-person, be that at a bar, work, night-class, sporting activity etc, with the same intention is fundamentally the same concept. Only the implementation details differ.

But there's a big, obvious, cultural difference. I wonder if that difference stems from the fact that one cannot mask one's ultimate intention when going the online route. In the in-person scenario, you always have the convenient social get-out that you were just there to enjoy whatever the activity is, and it's just a happy coincidence that you happened to meet someone whilst doing it. It's coy, relies on chance, and fits in with a traditionally romantic narrative.

With online dating, you admit straight up that your sole intention is to meet people and find a relationship - it's therefore explicitly implied that there's a degree of trial and error, and from the outset it's acknowledged that it's a numbers game with certain attributes - shared traits, hobbies, interests - feeding into a formula that defines whether or not we think a relationship is worth pursuing. I think it's simply this directness, and this exposure, that's seen as course and not fitting with our social/cultural model of how romance 'should work'.

I wonder if it'll always be this way? I'd propose that in the future it will be to some degree, but we'll just be somewhere else on the curve. Perhaps with tomorrow's dating services, we'll look back on today's online dating apps and view them as quite lo-fi and quaint - with their low-accuracy matching algorithms leaving so much to chance, making you do so much of the work, etc - i.e. just how we compare online dating vs meeting people in bars, today.

I guess we'll see how that concept of a 'naturally occurring relationship' evolves over time as societies and cultures shift.

My reasoning has little to do with romance and more to do with practicality. To me, people end up in good relationships because they can't imagine themselves without that person. On the other hand, people who are only looking to cure their loneliness usually end up with poor relationships.

I speculate this is because people who are lonely are more likely to "settle" whereas people who aren't looking but happen to find someone can always just leave the relationship with little difficulty and so if the relationship lasts it's due to compatibility.

I hope that didn't offend anyone, I have no issue with people going to bars or whatever to meet other people. This is just the way I like to live my life.

Personally, I find the lack of ambiguity about intentions to be a plus to meeting people through dating sites.

That's much easier said than done. Maybe it's easy for you, but from most of the people I've seen, including myself, when you have emotional involvement with something it's difficult not to be biased. It's easy to make excuses and convince yourself that you are doing the right thing. I think it was Stephen King who said it best, "We lie best when we lie to ourselves"

I'd actually say that you're way more likely to settle too early for someone you met "naturally" in real life than someone you matched with online or met due to dating purposefully. By purposefully dating you'll meet and "discover" many different people too find the one you're super-compatible with, by waiting to meet someone naturally you're more likely to settle with the first one that you "click" with.

Indeed this is also possible with "natural dating", if we consider natural dating to be the equivalent of online dating. I was trying to say that I'm against the idea of people thinking "I feel like I need to be in a relationship so I'm going to attempt to find someone to fulfill that need."

I think I am just against the idea that everyone needs to find someone or get married. From my experience, when two people who were not even thinking about relationships decide their lives are just much better if they are partners, they have a much higher chance of a lasting relationship or marriage.

Of course, I am fortunate because I am still young, and for people who are sure they want to start a family and are older, I can see why they would feel pressured to find someone, and all the power to them.

Hopefully that made sense. I actually agree that if someone were looking for a relationship, doing it online is much more efficient, especially with all the sites that use some scientific means of pairing people.