A stutter doesn’t have to stop you from having confidence. I was about your age when I figured that out finally. High school (and middle school ... and elementary school for that matter) had been awful (lots of bullying), and up until that point it had definitely stunted me romantically because I felt like, even when a girl expressed interest in me, I was was defective so if somebody liked me there *must* be something wrong with them. I was going through a particularly rough spot having just been dumped by someone I was *very* in to, and of course I was internalizing it all. I was on Facebook trying to avoid my 120 page research paper, and saw the profile of a girl who was a friend of a friend. She seemed awesome. Cute, great music taste, well read, witty ... so I did something weird and very out of character for me: I messaged her out of the blue. I don’t know why I did. I might have been a little bit drunk. Anyway. We started talking, and after a couple weeks of texting eventually decided to meet up to “hang out.” I was nervous as hell, because even though we had been talking nonstop, she hadn’t heard my voice. So of course pretty early into the hang out / date I started stuttering. She paused and asked me “Do you stutter?” I said yes, expecting the worse. She said “Oh,” with about the level of interest you’d expect someone to say if you preferred brown rice to white, and kept going with her story. We ended up dating for almost a year, and only broke up because our schedules were both insanely busy and incompatible. I asked her about it later, and she kind of shrugged and said “I don’t know. You stutter. I snort when I laugh. It’s just a thing about you.” The truth is, if someone has a problem with your stutter, that’s a reflection on them, not on you. After that, I stopped second guessing myself because of my stutter, and the floodgates opened and I did a little *too* well with the ladies to the point where it often bordered on “man whore.” Learning to accept my stutter also made it less stressful, and as a result I stuttered a lot less. I still do, but when I do it’s a minor annoyance at best. So yes, it can prevent you from finding love, but only if you let it. Don’t worry what people think about your stutter, because they probably don’t. We judge ourselves much more harshly than anyone else does.