It seems that use of dating sites has gone up strongly since the new American president took office. This raises the interesting question of why people want to be with someone. How much of forming a relationship is driven by fear? In uncertain times, people cling together. Would an outbreak of peace and security be bad for relationships? Do relationships, in fact, thrive on danger and difficulty and do they then internalise some of this? Many relationships do seem to thrive on conflict. This can be seen as a form of displacement. Whatever the answer to these questions, it does seem that we are in a phase of pairing off.
It might be interesting to connect this line of thought with Bion's "basic assumption" thinking. Bion points out that people in groups (which could include families and nations) act in ways that rest upon an implicit assumption that the group must survive. This is the case even when the group serves little or no purpose. Many of us will have been in meetings in which the only thing that actually got decided was the date of the next meeting. Bion then theorised from his observations that this "basic assumption thinking" manifested in three different modes. These he called Dependency (baD), Pairing (baP), and Fight/Flight (baF). Perhaps, following the baF of the election campaign we have now moved into baP rather than baD because the new "parent" has not yet demonstrated his reliability sufficiently to enable us to all settle down into baD once again - as might have happened if the other candidate had won.
This is all pure speculation, of course, but interesting questions, perhaps.
Replies