Association free energies DG in water from NMR shift titrations with ten ion pairs from open-chain a,w-dianions and a,w-dications show a dependence on ionic strength that can be fitted to the Debye ± Hückel equation. In spite of the anisotropic nature of the ions, the D ± H coefficient m obtained in each case is close to the theoretical value m 4.07 for the dication/dianion combination. The DG values of the ten complexes and six literature values are all around 16 kJ mol À1 after extrapolation to ionic strength I 0.00, yielding a constant increment of 8 kJ mol À1 for each cation ± anion interaction. Although the number n of flexible single bonds in the ten complexes differs from 6 to 13, the difference between the strongest and the weakest complexes (DG À 16.3 and À 12.6 kJ mol
À1, respectively) is surprisingly small. A fairly linear correlation between DG and n is observed, which yields an energetic disadvantage of only DDG 0.5 kJ mol
À1for one single bond. This value is close to numbers obtained recently with similar hydrogen-bonded complexes in chloroform, and shows that until now the importance of conformational preorganization for effective molecular recognition has been overestimated.