Appairent Confusion

I must confess that pair and pairing confuse me. Oh, I get the basic two of a kind thing, which definitely applies to socks when and shoes yet when I don a pair of pants, there’s only one of them. With people it’s even worse for in our mostly monogamous society, we usually pair male and female, even though they are different at least externally and while it has worked extremely well for propagation of the species, we now number over eight billion, which may well be too much for our planet, especially as our impact depends more on income than numbers, the more we make the more we degrade, which may also apply to our society, where looking at those divorce numbers, it seems that pair bonding isn’t working that well. Then too, more pairs are deciding to be nulliparous which makes sense as we don’t want to go to sixteen billion, although the apparent decrease in fertility attributed to all those chemicals that were supposed to better our lives could also be a factor. All of which leads me to wonder what might have happened if as Eve pared Adam’s apple, he’d replied “Thanks, Babe but I’ll have a pear.”