Friendship contracts.........

For the last couple of nights my friend MrsHobbitWife (no obviously not her real name, but if you follow me on twitter, then yes, the name will be familiar) and I have been companion writing… that is to say, she is trying to do her assignment for her OU course, whereas I am scribbling fiction…

We then exchange what we’ve been writing and comment on it….. she is my main beta reader, editor and cheerleader (and handily has kids in the YA range who will also read for me)…. I still think she’s the better writer out of the two of us, she disagrees. 

Last night, having rounded up rent-a-mob and forced them into their crates … I swear they develop new tricks on a nightly basis to avoid going to bed...  I’d moseyed off upstairs and ended up on MSN talking to MrsHW about, well, absolutely everything and anything… though for some reasons our conversations whilst they start off pretty sane and normal seem to always descend quite swiftly to somewhere below gutter level… (last night we ended up with discussing where the fetish gear was safely kept and the real reason for thornless roses being developed….. apparently it’s less painful than the thorned versions when your being whipped with them and has the bonus that the petals fall off and float about like a cheesy 70’s port movie…….. yes, I know, just don’t ask!)

Anyway, at one point one of my cats leapt on my shoulder and missed, scratching all down one shoulder on her way back to the floor.  I typed my cursing in reaction and got back *snigger*,,, and so the conversation continued along the lines of I moaned that it wasn’t nice of her to laugh, to which she said it was okay for her to do this as it was in the contract…. Which started a whole string of comments about what was and wasn’t in the small print of the friendship contract we had….(turned out it wasn’t the friendship contract she was reading but the washing machine instructions… no I’ve never studied the small print on that one either…)

So, after I’d read for a bit, tried to sleep, and then given up I started thinking about the concept of friendship contracts… as you do at 1.00 am with mounting dread that the dogs will be going off in a little over 3 hours and you’ve work in the morning….the thing I came up with is that yes, we do have a friendship contract, hell everyone I am friends with there is some sort of friendship contract… friendship being offered and accepted much like a contract… and while the terms of no two friendships contracts are the same, they also change over time as friendships develop, or in some cases fall away… yes sometimes one party will be in breach of contract (see my inner lawyer appear)….but as a general rule for me at least none of my contracts are one sided, friendship is a two way street ...... as for the small print, that’s up to each friend to work out the limits on it for themselves.