Relationship contract
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A relationship contract is a legal agreement that governs the general relationship between two parties, within the parameters of which they can transact or provide and consume services among themselves, but the relationship contract itself does not commit either party to any transaction in particular. They are framework agreements. They describe an architecture within which the parties may dance.
So, terms of business, ISDA Master Agreements and other master trading agreements, custody agreements and so forth. Unlike transactions, relationships are long, indeterminate affairs of no fixed duration — the longer the better<ref>The relationship, that is: once upon a time a legal eagle understood this truism to refer the written contract documenting the relationship and the rest is, as they say, the formal academic study of past events, particularly in human affairs, including, for the avoidance of doubt, any one or more specific series of past events, circumstances and activities arising in relation to or in connection with a particular person, place or thing.<ref> — and it is a curious fact that they suffer concentrated, intense, white-hot focus from all concerned during their formation, right up until the very moment they are executed — a period of time in which, necessarily, the parties have nothing at stake between them at all — and after, not a soul on either side gives them so much as a backward glance for the next twenty years, in which period the each party’s risk to the other may gyrate colossal peaks.
Relationship contracts are invariably struck in fine weather, but concern themselves exclusively with what should happen if it rains, hence they are basically a downer, articulating as they do the deepest and most paranoid fears of each other’s credit departments on a day that is meant to be one of unalloyed joy.
Where traditional marriage vows concern themselves with the countless ways each partner must strive to keep the relationship together however hard things get, relationship contracts catalogue all the ways one can contrive to get out of it at the first sign of trouble.
Because they contain no terms at all that would have made it onto the cocktail napkin, you may consider relationship contracts as pure, unadulterated boilerplate.