We derive and asymptotically analyze mass-action models for disease spread that include transient pair formation and dissociation. Populations of unpaired susceptibles and infecteds are distinguished from the population of three types of pairs of individuals; both susceptible, one susceptible and one infected, and both infected. Disease transmission can occur only within a pair consisting of one susceptible individual and one infected individual. By considering the fast pair formation and fast pair dissociation limits, we use a perturbation expansion to formally derive a uniformly valid approximation for the dynamics of the total infected and susceptible populations. Under different parameter regimes, we derive uniformly valid effective equations for the total infected population and compare their results to those of the full mass-action model. Our results are derived from the fundamental mass-action system without implicitly imposing transmission mechanisms such as that used in frequency-dependent models. They provide a new formulation for effective pairing models and are compared with previous models.
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