I am attempting to write a list of pairs of people, like so: "The pairings are Bob and Jane, Joe and Mary, and Fred and Ashley." This works fine in that the comma lets you know where each pairing is broken up. However, if I only have two pairings, I'm not entirely sure how to phrase that. Both options I can think of look incredibly awkward to me, and I'd like to know which is the preferred way of phrasing it (or if there is another way that I did not mention).
Option 1 is "The pairings are Bob and Jane and Joe and Mary." without a comma, which is hard to parse.
Option 2 is "The pairings are Bob and Jane, and Joe and Mary.", which looks awkward to me because there are only two things in the list, and usually you omit the comma for that.
Any help on this would be much appreciated.