You know, I actually spent like half an hour trying to draft a long reply to this post and I just couldn't do it. I guess I just can't give you a comprehensive answer to that question! It feels quite complicated. The short answer, though, is that I really admire people who are brave enough to deal with something like this. Like I said, I think it's the coolest thing. I'm pretty sure that if I stuttered, I'd be super shy the whole time and only talk to really close friends. I mean, I'm shy enough as it is! So any time someone just gets on with their life, doing outgoing things such as talking to strangers like me, and they don't give a fuck about this when it would be so easy to be scared, I'm floored. Just, so impressed. With me and my friend, there are other reasons too, but they're kind of personal. I mean, this is a really personal thing and everyone's different. I'm happy to go into it if you're interested, but they're specific to that friendship and thus probably non-transferable. Have you ever considered that you might actually find it *more* annoying to listen to someone stuttering than a fluent person would? I mean, you've had a lifetime of mentally associating stuttering with very negative emotions, and the rest of us haven't. Personally I don't find it annoying, and I'm not sure why we differ, but my best theory is it's because I've always associated it with positive emotions rather than negative ones.