  Mesons are made of quark-antiquark pairs held together by the strong force.
The one channel spectator, Dirac, and Salpeter equations can each be used to
model this pairing. We look at cases where the relativistic kernel of these
equations corresponds to a time-like vector exchange, a scalar exchange, or a
linear combination of the two. Since the model used in this paper describes
mesons which cannot decay physically, the equations must describe stable
states. We find that this requirement is not always satisfied, and give a
complete discussion of the conditions under which the various equations give
unphysical, unstable solutions.
