Love is not a contract.

So you are a poet or a musician. A songwriter perhaps and you feel good about yourself and your music or your words. Not great but pretty good anyway, because you know that something is missing. It could be better and you know it.

That lyric is missing the right combinations of words to put it over the top. Or your poem is missing that "groove" that when combined you know it would go farther than it would have on its own or the way it was originally written.

You heard that collaborations are the way to go, but you don't trust anyone and so you just keep it to yourself, maybe you get it published in some measly places that nobody cares about. But you want it to go places that, if you met that special someone, it would go to the top.

Well, one fine day you meet someone and you have what seems to be lots in common. You like rivers, nature, dogs, and poetry; music; and after a few months, you start to COLLABORATE! WOW!! It seems to just fall together so easily.

You fall in love with your collaborator and you create poems and songs together . Even if one does only a couple of words or a few phrases, you're collaborating and they belong to you both, or so it seems.

So you're all happy and you combine business. . . with your personal life. . . Oh, oh, but you don't realize it yet, that the bomb's about to explode.

You keep submitting songs over the years and you put some of your poems on each other's websites and life is wonderful and beautiful and. . . SCRATCH!!!!! (the sound of an old record with the needle going across it). For all you under forty, you'll just have to imagine some other sound. I know, fingernails across the chalk board.

Three or so years go by and your lover, protector, and promiser of eternal love, goes menopausal and just goes completely nuts!!! All of a sudden it becomes, "Those are my poems" and "that's my music" and "I own this" and "I own that" and, it just goes completely nuts.

What happened? The biggest mistake we all make at one point or another in our lives, and that is thinking that "love" is a contract. "We love each other, that won't happen to us." Love is not a contract.

A contract is a binding and legal document that lays out all the details and facts of your collaboration(s). Love on the other hand is simply a fly by night emotion that changes with every moment of every day and that isn't the way to make a contract, of any kind.

There was a time long ago, when a handshake was all it took to consummate a contract or a deal, but today with all the craziness going on and the legal battles that happen over nothing, a verbal or handshake contract is a thing of the past.

Look, it doesn't matter if you're in love with Athena or Adonis, all the good lovemaking will never hold up with your collaborations. My first advice to anyone is never have a business relationship with a friend and especially a lover.

Oh I know there are many businesses with husband and wife, pals, girlfriends and boyfriends, and some are even successful. But what's it really like when they're in bed with each other after spending 15 hours in their business? Or the strain when your boyfriend wants to branch out and little miss girlfriend starts to get jealous and makes Adonis' life a living hell because of it.

If you're going to have a business relationship, better get everything in writing because sooner or later, one or the other is gonna change, and that leads to nothing but total misery.

You want to do the tango with each other is your business, but if you want a collaborator, if you want to do business, serious business, make sure you're not sleeping with her; it will burn you in the end and you'll be sleeping with the enemy.

Love on its own is great and even business seperated from personal involvement is fine. But if you are going to collaborate, get it in writing because sex and love is NOT a contract.