dating poem

How can i avoid flirtation from homosexuals?

I'm a ladies man, girls flirt with me all the time. The downside of this is that i get a lot of homosexuals flirting with me too. Seeing guys look at me the way i look at a girl when i like her makes me really uncomfortable and sometimes aggressive. My question is: what can i do to prevent the latter?

Do descriptions of flirtation and seduction give a good picture of sexual relations between humans?

Anybody have an opinion or some insight?
It's a question being asked in my Philosophy of Love class. Only serious answers please.

In your opinion what is the line between teasing, flirtation, and harassment? How do you know when harassment?

In your opinion what is the line between teasing, flirtation, and harassment? How do you know when harassment exists? Why do people not always agree on what harassment is and when it has occurred. . .

Is it wrong to use mild flirtation to gain more business from clients?

They're smart, powerful men; they know nothing will come of it anyway. So they throw some extra business your way because they see you as a nice, fun break in their day. Is it morally wrong to accept that business? Or, is it fair to say that you SHOULD use every tool at your disposal to get all the business you can for yourself, and hence, your company?
EDIT: I would now like to replace the word "flirtation" with "charm". I meant it the same way, anyway.
But right, that is a better word to use.

Every year many people become a victim of online dating scams. Unfortunately these people do not even realise they are victims to dating scams until it is too late. The intention of all dating scams is to obtain money from innocent members of dating websites, therefore the importance of being familiar with the types of scams used and recognising the signs of a scammer cannot be underestimated.

A scammer can work alone, or as part of a larger group of individuals who spend their time chatting to legitimate members of dating websites. They do this by creating a false profile, often similar to your perfect match and they befriend you and gain your trust and affection. Once you have let your guard down and you believe they are your ideal partner, it is at that point that you could fall victim to one of the many scams widely used. The four main scams used on dating websites are the travel scam, the prostitute scam, the phone scam and the postal scam. Each scam is fairly straightforward and all result in you departing with your money if you fall victim to one. 

One of the main purposes of using an online dating website is to eventually meet up with the individuals you chat to. Once you agree to meet up with someone, who unknowingly to you is a scammer, they will explain to you that they are currently living overseas and cannot afford the travel expenses to visit you. Having gained your trust and affection it is at this point they ask you to send them money for travel expenses and many innocent people send money to a scammer hoping that they will finally get to meet the man or woman of their dreams, but in reality you will never hear from them again. This is known as the travel scam and is sadly very commonly used.

The prostitute scam is fairly simple. Prostitutes take advantage of the online dating market and use dating websites to solicit business. A false profile is created, usually with a sleazy username and a raunchy detailed description, therefore making it relatively easy to recognise. Some people believe these prostitutes are genuinely looking for a relationship, but don’t be fooled into thinking this. They are on dating websites for one reason only; to make money at your expense.

The phone scam has been around for many years now but has now sadly become one of the online dating scams. As a member of a dating website you may receive a message from someone you have become friendly with asking you to phone them on the phone number given to you. You will be led to believe they want to talk to you in person away from the dating website. Unfortunately the phone number will not belong to the person you believe you are in contact with and you will find yourself receiving a large phone bill as a result of phoning the number given to you.

Scammers use several variations of the postal scam, although the principle is the same for all of them; you will be asked to send money. The most common postal scam is the Nigerian 419 scam which is also known as AFF or Advanced Free Fraud. This scam is usually used by people living in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana and possibly other countries in western Africa. Once a scammer has befriended you, they will tell you that they live in the UK and are currently working abroad, generally one of the countries previously mentioned. They will then give a plausible reason for needing money urgently and ask you to send them the money leading you to believe that you are the only person that can help them. Many people fall for the scams at this point and send the requested money, believing that they are genuinely helping a new friend in need. Scammers give many reasons for needing money, some examples are; They will tell you that they have a critically ill relative back in the UK and they need money for travel expenses to urgently visit them; They will claim to have been mugged and all their money and credit cards have been stolen, therefore requiring money to help them; They will tell you they are a student and need money while they complete their university degree; They may claim to be a relative of a deceased government official and require your assistance in transferring large sums of money, promising to give you a large amount of money in return for allowing them to use your bank account.

The importance of knowing when you could be in contact with a scammer cannot be underestimated. There are several signs to look out for which may include; a vague personal description that does not match the photo; they will avoid answering questions, usually because they are sending the same message to numerous people; conversations will be repeated; the tone and style of message may change; the use of very poor grammar and spelling, although this sign alone does not mean they are a scammer as many people have spelling and grammar issues; immediate responses to your messages; they will ask you to switch to using your personal email to avoid detection by the dating website; they will claim to be in love or falling in love with you, possibly sending you a romantic poem. One of the most obvious signs to look out for is a profile photo that looks like a model, which probably is of a model, but not a picture of the person sending you messages. Scammers use photos of beautiful people because profiles with beautiful people usually receive more mail, therefore the scammers have numerous people to choose between when deciding who they are going to pursue. More often than not if a profile photo looks too good to be true, it usually is.    

If you have been a victim of a scam and have sent money, unfortunately there is little chance of you recovering it. Once money has been sent, the scammer usually ends all communication with you, although there is a slight chance you may be asked to send more money. If you are concerned you are in contact with a scammer, report them immediately to the online dating website you are using and stop all correspondence with them. 

In general online dating sites are completely safe, as long as you follow the safety rules and look out for the signs of a scammer. Many sites both large and small screen members and look out for scammers, but unfortunately some online dating sites allow anyone to join and are only concerned in members actively sending messages. Don’t be fooled into thinking larger paying dating sites screen members, as not all of them do.

When using any online dating website, under no circumstances should you send money to anyone or reveal your bank account details. No matter how plausible a reason may sound, never send money. Having gained your trust a scammer will take advantage of your feelings and kind nature. No matter how well you feel you know someone, be sceptical and avoid becoming a victim to an online dating scam.

Deborah Dixon

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Unadulterated Love By Clayton Dunham, Published By Outskirts Press. For More Info, Visit www.outskirtspress.com.

I remember, one afternoon in 2004, watching TV in my aunt's sitting room in a small West Bank village. Much of the night before had been taken up speaking about the current toxic situation in the region, my family regaling me with tales of redemption, betrayal and fear. All told with a hefty serve of humour. I could tell that in some ways, peculiarly enough, there were people in other parts of the world who took their situation more seriously than themselves.

My feelings were confirmed when the next day I sat in front of the TV, flicking channels and finally settling on one of the many music stations taking the Arab world by storm. This one was called "Superstar", not to be confused with the pan-Arab Idol show of the same name, and it ran music videos and concert clips 24/7, SMS messages of love and flirtation scrolling constantly across the bottom of the screen in gaudy technicolour. A family friend later confirmed that they were watching Mazzika, another of these music channels, more than Al-Jazeera. It all seemed very bizarre to me, but I concluded that in such times of trouble, no matter how misguided it seemed, music videos, with their cheeky storylines and buffed, good-looking and impossibly happy actors, obviously served as an antidote. Forget occupation and war - Nancy Ajram had a new album out.

I guess not even a familiarity with Western MTV culture would prepare me for the pop culture-saturated Middle East I visited and slightly recoiled from. I write this as a Muslim who has grown up in Australia, but with an enduring love of my heritage. I encountered a Middle East I wasn't quite prepared for on many levels, but my understanding is layered and borne out of something entirely different to that of those women who visit the Arab world in search of tales of woe (think Geraldine Brooke's Nine Parts of Desire and the more recent The Veiled Lands by Christina Hogan). And I think that's partly why I don't feel any richer for having read Muhajababes.

Meet Allegra Stratton, BBC journalist and twenty-something-year-old. She lets you know straight off the bat that she's a bit of a firecracker. She's had an argument with her roommate about the legitimacy of the US invasion of Iraq: roommate says it's bad, Stratton thinks it's good news. She soon realises that the war in Iraq is nothing short of a catastrophe and this somehow leads her to take some time off to explore the Middle East, no doubt in search of 10-year-olds wielding AK-47s. "I'd go there and see whether their young population - in all its puppy-fat enormity - was taking form as the profs would like it to. I wasn't going to get into Iraq but I could go to countries near it", she tells us importantly and in what is, as I eventually realise, her humour-lite style. There are funny moments, but she's not a comedian.

Stratton's "book of conversations" is essentially that: a record of her meetings with anyone who seemed her age whom she interviewed (youth being her basic criteria) during her trek through Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Dubai. What Stratton seems to have found is a bunch of pretentious, hippy-nostalgic luvvies, who, incidentally, are just as annoying as their Western counterparts.

To give you an idea of the flavour, consider some of the characters she covers: there's Walid who wants to instigate revolution in Lebanon, despite having one of the less autocratic governments in that part of the world, and whom she describes as "a lucky mixture of the best bits of some of the world's foxier men. What Mr Potato Head would look like if he had David Bowie's frame, Bob Dylan's head, shoulders and slouch, and Jimi Hendrix's mania". She also meets the Jordanian Daoud, an untalented (according to Stratton) artist of nude paintings who barely scrapes by and neglects his widowed mother in pursuit of bad art. Then there's Darah, a sexually ambiguous woman who first introduces Stratton to the term 'muhajababe'. It is Darah who, in gridlocked traffic, points out two girls who were "cigarello thin and Coco Chanel chic. Both wore black-nylon boot-cut hipster trousers and high heels, carried baguette handbags and wrapped around their heads were black sheer headscarves as tight as the rest of their outfits".

Finally, meet the muhajababes. Music clip-influenced girls and the inspiration for the book, who appear to veil either because they have to or because Amr Khaled, an enormously popular preacher from Egypt, told them they should.

I think we're meant to be overwhelmed and enlightened by this revelation. Yet none of this greatly surprised me, having seen countless young women on the street in Amman and even in Sydney adopt this approach for years, their bodies wrapped seductively in tight clothing, and their headscarves sitting loosely on their made-up faces, the scarf looking very much like a nun's habit without the cap. Muhajababes are everywhere, yet Stratton suggests she's discovered something extraordinary. In fact, this is one of the problems with her commentary: she writes as though everything is shocking and finds a great deal taxing when it comes to fatwas and culture. She certainly doesn't seem to like Islam or Muslims very much, or perhaps it's just a superior attitude of indifference with her seeming to roll her eyes impatiently every so often in response to all the silliness surrounding her.

Either way, Stratton's Sesame Street approach to pan-Arab politics and lifestyle is frustrating; it's all so unthinkable and peculiar to her, yet finding the Middle East's losers or aspiring, dream-fuelled youth with a beef or two is hardly groundbreaking and I soon wondered how amazed we would be if an Arab woman went to the US and the UK and talked about all of the awful things she heard about.

Based on her conversations, Stratton zones in on two main figures: Amr Khaled, who she paints as little more than a puffed-up and ridiculous evangelical figure of influence for the starved masses who follow him, lemming-like, as he spreads the word. The other is wealthy Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who runs these 24/7 music channels through his Rotana satellite stations.

The two are in stark contrast with each other, yet their respective influences connect. Khaled leads the reformation of Islam with "personal trendy piety", or what Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan) once called, Stratton notes, "air-conditioned Islam", leading girls to hijab before they're "ready"; Al-Waleed tells them what they should aspire to with his music clips. The result are muhajababes, girls who weakly attempt to reconcile the contradictory.

I took an obscene amount of notes as I read, yet none of it seems greatly significant now. Sufficed to say, both Khaled and Al-Waleed exert great amounts of influence and are making changes in their own success-driven ways.

Muhajababes essentially proves that greed and stupidity are alive and well in the Middle East, and excels in demonstrating the obvious: there are troubled areas, social misfits, a severe lack of freedom in general and a crucial diversity in attitudes, religiosity and culture. The Middle East is a melting pot of random things, and it is, not surprisingly, increasingly influenced by the West, Stratton observing that capitalists and major companies recognise the surge in palatable, Khaled-style piety and are using it for their own gain, Western-style.

Take, for example, Sami Yusuf, the outrageously popular semi-nasheed singer whose video clips grace TV screens inbetween Ajram and Amr Diab and who even promoted Coca Cola when he released his first album. He falls squarely into the "Khaledism" slot: a sexed-up religious approach. There are certainly interesting anecdotes and snippets of worthy commentary, but overall, it is a disappointing trip into the ordinary.

Meanwhile, Stratton doesn't inject much of her own personality into the book, except to deliver cynical and, at times, snotty observations, all told in her oft-caustic style of overflowing prose. While refreshingly honest in her obnoxiousness, I couldn't help but feel that, while greatly amused by the simpletons she met, Stratton not only seemed bored and unimpressed but was also perhaps questioning why she was even there.

She confesses, at one point, to being bored by the subject of hijab, saying she "wanted to find something a bit more fun". And that's the crux of it, because I am not convinced that this book, for all its magnanimous observations and "research", is actually important. Rather, it seems little more than a young woman's "project" to cash in on the Arab phenomenon; hers is a search for the obscure and try-hardish in the Arab world, and the result is a catalogue of the disheartened, disenfranchised youth who, not very uniquely, have social problems to deal with.

The main difference with the Western world's social problems being, obviously, a lack of democracy in the background. (And after reading some of the contentions contained within this book, one could truly think democracy is a cure for the world's ills). As Stratton comments at one point, when she has become weary, she thought "asking people about democracy in the Arab world was like talking about the weather, both because discussion of it was all around you, and because no one had any say in determining it".

I envision how this book will be sold. An intriguing and eye-opening insight into the Middle East, with Stratton cast as a hip, daring Westerner ready to smash through the stereotypes with every click of her keyboard. Yet, it is Stratton herself who "casts" people, hoping to find an A, B, C of culture clash and establishment rebellion. The more interesting conversations never occur, and she herself confesses that the book she wrote is not the one she initially set out to capture. I can't help but feel that there could have been much worthier tales to share and more deeply hidden experiences to uncover.

She ignores, for example, devout Muslims, depriving the book of any balance, focusing instead on self-haters with delusions of grandeur and a gripe or three. It's all so hammy that even Stratton observes her struggle to not cringe when listening to one particular girl's tale. These people offer their insight into why life is as it is for others, but more than anything they just complain and censure (for example, the girls not wearing hijab are quick to refer to muhajababes as the "sluttiest" girls around).

She does confirm that the Middle East has its own share of affected latte-sippers to contend with. But admittedly, the sippers may actually have something to truly fight for because as Stratton takes 280 pages to inform you, the Middle East is a hotbed of change and revolution right now. It's just a shame you don't close the book and want to go there yourself.

Amal Awad

It is easy to express your true feelings and thoughts in free-verse rather than rhyme. You don't need to be a Shelley or Shakespeare to write a great poem. All it takes is sincerity, a little effort and a loving feeling

Steps
Write a page of standard prose, as fast as you can, about how you felt the first time you saw your loved one, how you felt the first time you knew you were in love, and how you feel right now about being together. These three moments in time will create the structure of your poem.
Replace any weak verbs with stronger verbs and any pronouns with proper nouns. Words depicting taste, touch, sight, smell and sound work really well for love poems.

Reread your passage and pick a central metaphor to tie the three moments together. Choosing a metaphor is the most challenging part, but don't hesitate to be wild with it. An opening flower is a tried and true metaphor for love, but a slow-motion explosion in reverse or a baby's first step might work even better.

Rewrite your passage using the metaphor to describe the three moments.
Read your page out loud, changing anything that sounds off to you. Make notations where you feel there's even the slightest pause in the flow of writing.

Write the poem on paper, putting a line break where you made the notations.

Type the poem neatly or write it in your best handwriting. Consider framing your poem. Your loved one may want to keep the poem as a memento!

Read the poem out loud to the person you love, or wrap it in special wrap, and present it as a gift for her or him to open when alone.

Tips
You're not trying to write the 'Greatest Poem Ever'. Your poem is for the one you cherish the most. What matters is that it's personal and sensuous.

Sit in a quiet room, and think about your 'love', how you feel when you are together, and apart. Think about what you miss most when you do not see each other, and how you feel when you again see each other. As you ponder this, write your thoughts and feelings. Poetry should come from the heart, and your heart and your thoughts will create a love poem based on you and only yours feelings.

There's no need to be intimidated by complex rhyme schemes. Remember, most contemporary poetry doesn't rhyme. Former Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky and Louise Gluck and current Poet Laureate Ted Kooser all write poetry that does not rhyme.

The best writing advice is simple: omit needless words. One strong verb steamrolls any three weak ones.

Poetry and almost all artful prose is about how the words reveal your feelings. Take time when you read your writing out loud to yourself, and see if you feel what your words are saying. If they stir up emotion within you, be assured they will do the same for the person you are writing it for.

Make it personal. Don't fill it with cliches but find something unique or special in your relationship and write about that. Your poem should be a reflection of the love you both share.
One useful tip for any kind of poem is to write it twice: first with the heart, then with your brain. Don't forget to express exactly what you want, but try not to sound cheesy.

Go to websites and get an idea . Do not copy them, it will get you nothing, your loved one can find out easily

Adam Bell

I love Tarja Turunen, she's the world's best singer! and she's beautiful. I love her,and her voice. Born from silence, silence full of it A perfect concert my best friend So much to live for, so much to die for If only my heart had a home Sing what you can't say Forget what you can't play Hasten to drown into beautiful eyes Walk within my poetry, this dying music - My loveletter to nobody Never sigh for better world It's already composed, played and told Every thought the music I write Everything a wish for the night Wrote for the eclipse, wrote for the virgin Died for the beauty the one in the garden Created a kingdom, reached for the wisdom Failed in becoming a god Never sigh for better world It's already composed, played and told Every thought the music I write Everything a wish for the night "If you read this line, remember not the hand that wrote it Remember only the verse, songmaker's cry the one without tears For I've given this its strength and it has become my only strength. Comforting home, mother's lap, chance for immortality where being wanted became a thrill I never knew The sweet piano writing down my life" "Teach me passion for I fear it's gone Show me love, hold the lorn So much more I wanted to give to the ones who love me I'm sorry Time will tell (this bitter farewell) I live no more to shame nor me nor you And you... I wish I didn't feel for you anymore..." A lonely soul An ocean soul A lonely soul An ocean soul A lonely soul An ocean soul A lonely soul <b>...</b>