more Pern-iciously inane thoughts

Read a good SF piece by Anne McAffery lately - a pre AI piece about man bonding with machine, only in this case the "machine" was a doomed-to-death human being who had been welded into a machine(spaceship), and who was essentially the ship

anyways, inane thought is as follows, McAffery uses a similar scene in the story and in her Pern stories - a Swayamvar essentially.
In the story a ship gets to "choose" the human pilot that will fly with her on all her missions.
The dragons in her story get to choose their riders in a ceremony.
Although, now that I think of it, the dragon-rider bonding was always male-male and female-female rather than the other way around.
Before anyone yells gay, methinks its more Tango-and-Cash-ish than that.