The dating struggle for people who stutter

For a lot of people the whole dating game is quite difficult. First you have to meet somebody who you find attractive and whom finds you attractive in return.

 

You then have to impress them with your conversational skills, you then have to meet their friends and family. You then have to be considerate by showing listening skills when they are feeling down and of course remembering things such as their birthday! This is just a small part of a long list.

 

When I was a teenager looking for love I had something else to contend with which made this dating game one thousand times harder - I had a speech impediment commonly known as a stutter or stammer.

 

Attempting to chat up a girl when you have a fear that you could stutter at any moment is not easy. I was somebody who hated being asked questions as this is where I tended to stutter the most.

 

These girls/women are bound to ask me a number of personal questions, what will they think if I stutter when I give the answer?

 

When on the rare occasion I was able to attract a girl I would then have other fears:

 

Will I stutter when meeting her parents?

 

How will her brother and sister react when they hear my stutter?

 

How will her friends react when they hear the stutter?

 

People who tend to find meeting women fairly easy have what is often referred to as the gift of the gab. Having a stutter made having the gift of the gab virtually impossible for me.

 

I have to say that despite these fears many of the girls/women I met were quite happy to date somebody who had a stutter, they seemed to kind of mother me in some way.

 

Stuttering did however cause me to lose out on one girl, she wanted to get married and the whole thought of the having to say the vows, to give a speech and the huge social occasion, scared me to death.

 

There was absolutely no way that I was going to go through with that, in any case I was only nineteen at the time.