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From: Paul
Date: 10/20/02
Time: 7:05:10 AM
Remote Name: 193.217.177.164
I would love to say that it did, which would have probably completed our love story with a great flourish. But to be honest, I would have to say that marriage did not improve my fluency. As I noted in one of my replies above, when I first arrived in Norway I experienced a very difficult time with my speech, which lasted for nearly a half year. This was undoubtedly due to all the simultaneous major changes in my life. Some of these were very positive ones - a change of lifestyle through marriage to a loving mate who seemed divinely destined for me, after a long bachelorhood (I was 46 at the time); and a relocation to a very beautiful and peaceful country, into a neighborhood surrounded by forests, mountains, lakes and fjords. But other changes were quite challenging - being in a new linguistic environment, immersed into a new culture, and being far from my American family and friends. When I first arrived in Norway I left all my family and friends behind thousands of miles away, and I didn't understand most of the conversations taking place around me. (The Internet though helped a great deal in maintaining contacts with the people I left behind in the U.S.) All these changes in my life had their cumulative effect, and I struggled with my speech for a very long time.
Eventually over time I became more used to my new environment and new way of life, and my disfluency levels improved to what they had been before my move.
Although my fluency itself hasn't improved by having a wife, I think that my attitudes towards my stuttering, the ways that I look at my life, and my general state of happiness have certainly undergone major changes in these last two years. In the U.S. I felt it was of crucial importance to be as fluent as I possibly could at all times, and I worked and practiced hard and diligently to boost my fluency. In Norway I have very much relaxed this attitude, and I have found that as a consequence I feel happier, less tense, and more comfortable with life. In Norway speech differences are much more acceptable in the U.S. -there are many different dialects around here, and all are regarded as equally acceptable. The dialects often have somewhat different vocabularies and even different grammars, and are so diverse that Norwegian uses two different written languages ("bokmål" and "nynorsk") to accommodate them all. When you add to this mix a large number of recent immigrants who primarily use English in day-to-day conversations, and the Swedish and the Danish that are occasionally heard, there is truly a great mixture of different types of speaking around. Stuttering then becomes just one more speech difference - people in Norway are used to hearing people speak in such great many ways that few bat an eyebrow when they encounter a speech problem.
I'm not more fluent than when I was a bachelor, but I certainly am happier, more relaxed, and more comfortable with myself, my speech, and with the fact that I happen to stutter. - Paul