SHI Symbol International’s Weblog

Entries from July 2008

And you think you’re a Stud – Mix 94.5 brings us Dimetri

July 17, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Top rating Radio Station Mix 94.5 happened to play a telephone message left by a chappie who had a chance meeting with a woman. I actually got to listen to it when they played it the first time and nearly choked in my weeties laughing. The sad thing is this was for real!

Boy, this boy must be on something. It is extremely entertaining and worth the time to listen. It will certainly brighten up your day.

Do have a click and I’d love your feedback – especially from shrinks. I also think we should start a comp for the best nickname to give this fellow -all ideas gratefully received!

Enjoy! http://www.mix.com.au/perth/shows/thebunch/features/dimitri_the_stud.html 

And please, I don’t want to know if you REALLY know the guy! On the other hand we have a resident psych for you who could point you in the right direction!

Categories: dating · love · meet your match · men · message · mobile phone · partner · relationships · shi symbol · single · singles · women
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Want to find love? Try these Ten Things Before You Give Up – they really work.

July 16, 2008 · 3 Comments

It must be the week for nice articles to come across my desk. This one I particularly love because it subscribes to my motto of ‘live live to it’s fullest’. Have a great read and I know you’ll feel even better by the end of it. I really like Point Number 5 because it is so true (as are all the others!) – it’s just that with a SHI Symbol on it’s so much easier to take that step and say Hello!

I believe this article was written by a Jackie Mahaney but don’t know more about her because the rest of the line of info on her was not visible!

 

Tired of being single? Weary from the dating scene? Feeling as though giving up on finding true love is your best choice at the moment? If your answer to these questions is a resounding yes, I ask you to first consider trying these ten ideas. If none of them work… you have my permission to throw in the towel, at least for a month or two!

1. Create a “Must Have” and “Can’t Stand” list.

How do you know what you are looking for in a partner if you haven’t taken the time to actually sit down and write it out? Take out a piece of paper… on one side make a list of the qualities that your ideal mate “must have.” On the other side of the paper, make a list of the qualities you could not stand for your partner to possess.

The items on your list must represent the qualities that are most important to you. The items must also be more realistic and less superficial. For example, instead of saying, “I want my partner to be rich.” You might want to say, “I want a partner who is financially responsible.”

Take the list that you create and put it in a safe place so that you can compare the qualities that are important to you against the qualities of prospective dates. Keep in mind that you are not looking for perfection in others. Few people will meet all of your “Must Haves”… but they should meet the really important ones.

2. Act as though you already have a mate

Have you ever heard a married man who wears a wedding ring say he gets hit on more now than he did when he was single? There is truth to that. The reason why is because people who are already in a relationship have nothing to gain or lose by getting to know strangers. There is not a feeling of discomfort or awkwardness when striking up conversations. There is no sense of, “I hope they don’t think I like them.” “I hope I don’t come across that I do like them.” “I am not sure this person is my type, I better not talk with them.” “This person is so hot that I am feeling nervous.”

When you have a partner you can get to know people without all of these worries, concerns and expectations. You can get to know people just for who they are. Many people you talk to may not seem like “your type” at first, but the more you open up the conversation the more you may realize they are worth getting to know. People in relationships don’t put initial judgments on others because they are not vulnerable to the consequences of getting to know others. Act in this way and you will find a world of dating opportunity opening up to you!

3. Be vulnerable and open with people

My yoga instructor said it perfect, “I am strong because I am vulnerable. I am vulnerable because I am strong.” In other words, being real and imperfect with people is actually a very attractive quality. Just being yourself is the best way to demonstrate how wonderful you are.

Think of how attracted you are to men/women who seem to be genuine and open about themselves and their lives. Walls are made to hold people in, or close people out. Walls around your heart hold people back and push love further away.

4. Start doing more of the things that you love

So many people want to meet someone special so that they can share their interests with a partner. I suggest that you start spending more time doing the things you love and see if you meet someone who also loves to participate in these things. If you love to play tennis… why not join a tennis league? If your hobby includes reading, why not spend more time in bookstores? The love of your life could show up on the other side of the net, or perhaps in the next aisle!

5. Make eye contact and say hello to ten strangers of the opposite sex each week

Most people would agree that there is nothing sexier than eye contact. Looking someone in the eyes and saying “hello” demonstrates sincerity as well as confidence. Remember in the movie Jerry McGuire when the character played by Renee Zellweger says, “You had me at hello?” Get someone at hello!

6. Tell your friends and family that you are ready to find a life partner

Advertising works! Referrals are the best source of positive advertising. Telling your friends and family you are truly ready for a committed relationship is like starting your own advertising campaign. They will be pleased that you have shared your desires with them and you will find that once people know this, they become aware of keeping their eyes and ears open for others with the same goal! Be ready to be set up on some great dates from people who have your best interest at heart!

7. Smile more

A smile is worth ten thousand words. A smile on your face creates a twinkle in your eye and often a spring in your step. People, by nature, are drawn to what makes them feel good. Smiling people make others feel good. Draw them to you with a nice solid grin!

8. Say yes more than you say no

According to Webster’s Dictionary the word “yes” is described as “used as a function word to express agreement.” Are you ready? Yes, I am!

In contrast, Webster’s defines the word “no” as “a function to express the negative.” Yes opens your world, no closes it. If you are ready to change your life, the meet a partner, to experience more… then you need to say “yes” to life. Yes to love, yes to change, yes to adventure and yes to the opportunities of meeting other wonderful singles, just like you.

9. Go out of your comfort zone

Do you remember the last time that someone talked you into doing something that you did not want to do? Do you remember thinking that an evening on your couch would be more fun than going to a rodeo? You end up going and 9 out of 10 times, what happens? You have fun!

Don’t feel comfortable walking up to someone and asking them to dance? What do you have to lose? What do you have to gain? When you go out of your comfort zone, you grow as a person. You experience new things and may even meet new people. Maybe you’ll meet “the one!”

10. Pray and project your desires into the universe

Have you ever heard of the researcher Dr. Elizabeth Targ? If not, let me “enlighten” you. She conducted a study on the therapeutic effects of prayer on AIDS and cancer patients. The results were striking.

After selecting practicing healers from a group of Christians, Buddists, Jews and Indian shamans… she supplied them with first names, blood counts and photographs of 20 patients with advanced Aids. For an hour a day, over a ten-week period, the healers concentrated their thoughts and prayers of these twenty people. There was another group of twenty that they did not focus on.

Targ’s research showed that the prayed for patients had fewer and less severe new illnesses, fewer doctor’s visits, less hospitalizations and were in better moods. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I choose to believe in the power of prayer and positive thoughts.

Prayer is about having faith and believing in what you can’t see. It is about accepting the idea that verbalizing your hopes, dreams and wishes is the beginning steps to making them a reality in your life. You don’t have to be a religious person to know that positive thinking creates positive actions which create positive life experiences.

I think the power of prayer is powerful and I recommend giving it a try – no matter what your spiritual beliefs are. Like Dr. Targ’s study… your results might just be striking!

Categories: dating · love · matchmaking · meet your match · men · partner · relationships · shi symbol · single · singles · women
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Look Someone in the Eye for Love at First Sight

July 15, 2008 · 1 Comment

This is a great article I found on Fox News and I liked it so much I had to share it with you all. These days we are so caught up running around and unable to find the time to ’simply meet people’ that it is often harder and harder to meet the man or woman of our dreams.

Dr Fulbright explores the theme of whether Love at First Sight is the real deal or not – in my book it certainly is and with our SHI Symbol for Singles it makes it so much easier to ’simply meet people’!

This is what Dr Fulbright says:

We’ve seen it happen in movies like “Moulin Rouge” and “Titanic.” We’ve heard it sung about in tunes like, “I Saw Her Standing There.” We’ve marveled over it in TV shows like “Dharma & Greg.”

Yet despite the media’s love affair with it, is there any reality to love at first sight? Can just one look spark romantic attraction? Perhaps more importantly, does finding the “one” in a flash ultimately bring a “match made in heaven”?

While I’ve experienced instant “energy” and attraction at first sight, I’ve never known love at first sight. It takes a bit more than eye candy for somebody to truly catch my interest.

But I know people who have experienced this wonder. A couple of them are now married. And they’re quite incredulous about it. Who knew that Cupid could so easily make the perfect shot?

Apparently, a lot of people think he’s quite the marksman. An Israeli poll of 240 males and 253 females found that 56 percent believed in love at first sight. Forty percent also held the belief that everyone has a twin romantic soul. Another survey, from the 1960s, of 679 American men and women found that 30 percent had indeed fallen in love the moment they laid eyes on their partner.

Yet despite people’s expectations around such split-second seductions, love researchers will tell you that love at first sight is rare. In an interview study on this phenomenon, psychology professor Ayala Malach Pines, author of “Falling in Love,” found that only one-tenth (or 11 percent) of her participants had fallen in love at first glance. Thirty-three percent of participants said they fell in love gradually.

Still, when love at first sight does happen, men tend to get hit with Cupid’s arrow more often than women, according to research by evolutionary psychologists, like David Buss, who study the sexual differences between men and women.

The reason for this is quite crude, but also understandable. A women’s physical appearance, for example, gives men a plethora of cues as to her fertility and reproductive value. Interestingly, this also lends support to the notion that men are more taken with physical attractiveness than women. (Notion? that’s all we ever hear about from guys!)

What’s even more fascinating is that the characteristics of first-sight attraction are shared by other species. We’re not simply love-crazed humans. Many creatures express instant attraction, much like humans, in that we all:

— Focus our attention on this preferred mating partner;

— Find our energy level boosted;

— Become obsessive in thinking about the love object; ain’t that the truth!

— Suffer from sleeplessness and a loss of appetite; uh-huh, there again, the sleeplessness could be for a couple of reasons…

— Practice possessiveness over our mates;

— Show physical affection, such as nuzzling; Is that all? I don’t think so

— Demonstrate goal-oriented courtship behaviors;

— Channel all of our energies to win over this particular beloved. Its that obsessive thing again!

Regardless of sex, this instant attraction makes sense, biologically speaking. Many species only have a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks to breed. As mating consumes time and energy, wooing can put one in a compromising position, increasing the creature’s vulnerability to predators.

Early man likely experienced the same. Thus, love at first sight enables men and women to focus their energy on a particular individual and to begin the courtship — and breeding (must have been written from the ’70s on!)— straight away.

Research out of the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom further lends support for this evolutionary perspective, but with a twist. Instant attraction does prevent one from wasting his or her time, but it’s also a narcissistic response. Love at first sight has little to do with romance. Instead, it’s all about ego.

People are attracted to those who are attracted to them. Investigators at the university’s Face Research Laboratory found that the most important cue in showing interest in another is whether someone is looking directly at you. (Helped along by your SHI Symbol of course)

So, call it Cupid, the media, divine intervention, or Mother Nature at work, is love at first sight ultimately all that? With many mistaking lust for love, instantaneously falling for someone could actually prove itself disastrous. As we all know, hopping in the sack doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with “together forever” hopes.

Investigators at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands sought to learn just how well the effortlessly amorous fair in the long run. In a study involving 137 married or cohabitating couples, researchers found that those who experienced love at first sight did become romantically involved faster than those who hadn’t.

It also found that these couples shared more dissimilar personalities. They differed primarily around levels of social interaction, emotional stability, and autonomy. These couples did not, however, report lower relationship quality.

Certainly, it gives all of us enough incentive to look someone straight in the eye the next time you want a little bit — or a lot of — lovin.’

Dr. Yvonne Kristín Fulbright is a sex educator, relationship expert, columnist and founder of Sexuality Source Inc. She is the author of several books including, “Touch Me There! A Hands-On Guide to Your Orgasmic Hot Spots.”

Categories: Dr fulbright · dating · fox news · love · matchmaking · meet your match · men · partner · relationships · sex · shi symbol · single · singles · women
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How About You – Get in Quick for this

July 12, 2008 · Leave a Comment

HowAboutYou - the film based on the short story by Maeve Binchy.

Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Imelda Staunton, Brenda Fricker, Hayley Atwell and Joss Ackland.

From the producers of My Left Foot and My Beautiful Laundrette

We have a few double passes to give away – just tell us your favourite place to go on a first date.

  • First entries in win the tickets.
  • Winners notified by email or phone.
  • Collect tickets from SHI Symbol International at Shop 3/190 Hay Street East Perth
  • or they can be mailed to you.

Note: these tickets can be used on 18, 19 or 20th July.

HowAboutYou

Categories: entertainment · love · men · partner · relationships · shi symbol · single · singles · women
Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Is it Different Finding Love over 45?

July 2, 2008 · 4 Comments

There has been an enormous change in society ‘norms’. One of the most striking changes has been seeing what used to be standard practice is now no longer. A girl would finish school, be dating, have a boyfriend or two, decide on ‘the one’ and get married all by the age of 21 and by 22 have her first child.

Now women are opting for completing their High School and going on to further education to forge out their own career – not necessarily in the relationship arena simultaneously! This has meant fewer women have been intent on marrying young and having children young. If you look at Sex and the City and its devotees, so many women (and some men) could relate to the difficulties faced with trying to date and find meaningful relationships from around 30 years of age. In fact there has been a huge increase in the number of women having their first child after the age of 35. If you research many a private hospital with maternity wings, you’ll see the far greater numbers of women aged 30 years and over. There could be a number of contributing factors including the technological advances in IVF treatment that has allowed more couples to try and conceive their child after the magic 35 years of age which, by maternal medical definition, one is often thought of as over the hill, due to the rapid decline of the woman’s eggs! Tick, tock, tick, tock….. Girls, if you are reading this, leave your computer and get out there and start meeting someone. Blow the career for now. Famiy and children are far more important to you in the long run!

But, I digress, enough of all that – so we now know there are many more men and women not going down the married path for many years. Is it because they just haven’t found that true love? Is it because they haven’t been ‘looking’ for their true love? Or is it because they no longer know how to find their true love because this means meeting people, dating, meeting people, dating, meeting more people, dating etc etc.

The bottom line is they are still out there in the big world of dating, looking for ways of finding their true love. Perhaps it is the case that some of them may have thought, this is all too hard, it will just happen when it’s meant to. Others will have thought, boy, dating has certainly changed ’since my day’. How do I go out and meet people now?  

A recent USA Today article quoted Richard Elliott,54, a software engineer from Bedford, Texas, who said he had always wanted to be married, but “it just never happened.”

“I thought I’d buy a house and pool and work on an immaculate lawn, and I thought somebody would just show up. You get all these things and it makes you more attractive, but it doesn’t work that way. You have to get out there and be more proactive,” he says. I couldn’t have said it better myself Richard!

In his 40s, he says, he sold the house and bought a sailboat, which led him to meet people.

How many times have you spoken to your single girlfriend who says she has always wanted to be married, but it just wasn’t right with the men she’d been with. It always seems to go back to that gambling analogy of ‘it’s just a numbers game’. Basically, the more people you meet the more chance you have of finding your love – whatever your age.

Today we are blessed with all manner of avenues for seeking out our true love. Since the mid-1990s Online Dating has blazed a path to many a singles door. It certainly is now accepted practice for looking at new possible dates and seeking out a prospective partner.

 Other avenues include the Dinner for Six concept and of course the SHI Symbol International Symbol for Singles, which, as you know is your key to meeting people – worldwide.

So, in response to the query is it different finding love over 45, there is a groundswell of opinion that indicates one would have to say yes, because the ways in which we actively seek out dates have changed significantly from say 20 years ago. People need to be comfortable with

a) the computer

b) the internet

c) online dating

d) meeting total strangers via Singles dinners and the like

e) speed dating

f) computer matching via introduction agencies

and the list continues….

And yet… it need not be any different really. Why? because if we all just took the time to stop and smell the roses, stop and meet a few more people in our every day lives, found the time to take a walk around the park, or to the local shops, or went out dancing and not necessarily at a pub or club – you know go to a place you could really talk to someone – instead of us hurrying around day in day out, jumping in and out of our car from one thing to the next – we might just have the opportunity to AND notice a few more likely prospects, or at the very least simply talk to more people and widen our circle of friends and acquaintances without much more effort.

So is this blog about finding love over 45 or is it really about stopping and enjoying life and seeing what comes out of it – as the old saying goes, when you least expect it, something happens for you. And it will happen to you whether you are 25, 35, 45, 55, 65 and even 75!

There’s no need to wait till you’re 45 to test this theory. Start meeting more people today. And I mean, really engaging with them.

Life is yours for living and loving now.

Get out there and live everyone!

 

Categories: dating · dinner · love · married · matchmaking · meet your match · men · partner · pub · relationships · sex and the city · shi symbol · single · singles · women
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,