8-year-old’s advice led aunt to internet, marriage
Lindsey Stone’s young niece, Kylie, suggested Lindsey log onto Christianmingle. com to find a husband. She was more than a little amazed that the then-8-year-old knew about that site.
The niece was concerned for her cousin, Skylar, now 11.
“I have a special needs daughter who has got some pretty severe, chronic medical issues,” Lindsey explains. “[My niece] said that she felt sorry for Skylar because she would never get married. I said, ‘ That’s OK, not everybody gets married. I’m not married.’ That’s when she told me I should go sign up for that website she had heard about on TV.”
Lindsey laughed it off. Dating didn’t really fit into her life.
“It’s not one of the things you want to really advertise when you’re trying to meet people because it’s not something that people usually just want to jump into with two feet,” she says of parenting a disabled child. “It was always just me and her, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to meet people when you’re in the hospital a lot.”
That’s what brought her around to her niece’s way of thinking.
Around the same time, in January 2013, she was setting up her Christian Mingle account, Clint Overman was setting up his. His work schedule didn’t leave him much time to meet people.
Lindsey was the first woman he contacted. She mentioned her daughter in her profile, as well as that she’s a sports fan.
“I think she’s a beautiful woman,” he says, “so that caught my eye initially. She seemed like a very strong woman, very independent. That kind of drew me to her.”
They messaged back and forth through the dating website for a while before starting to text. A month or so later, they decided to meet for dinner at an Italian restaurant in west Little Rock.
“She beat me there because I’m always late for everything,” Clint says. “I walked up and I saw her sitting on a bench. I thought, ‘Wow, she’s beautiful.’” They were both nervous. “It was the first time I had been on a date in years and years, and I had some jitters,” she says. “I thought, ‘At least he’s nice to look at if the date goes badly,’” Lindsey says.
They had driven their own cars to the restaurant but they left together in Clint’s, first stopping to browse at a bookstore and then going on to a movie theater for a showing of Silver Linings Playbook.
After that night, they were together as often as possible. Most of the time, Skylar was with them.
“There are not a lot of people who just jump up and down and want to baby-sit, so she pretty much went with me everywhere. He met her pretty early because I was like, ‘Well, this is my life,’” Lindsey says.
Sometimes, though, they would find a sitter and see a movie or go to dinner or climb Pinnacle Mountain. One of their favorite outings was to sporting events, from the Arkansas Travelers to national teams.
For Clint’s birthday, Lindsey surprised him with tickets to see a Texas Rangers game in Arlington.
“I kind of thought, for her to do this she’s a keeper,” he says. “She loves baseball. She’s a Yankees fan so we butt heads a couple of times a year when they play each other.”
In October 2014, Clint sat next to Lindsey as she waited for the bus to arrive to take Skylar to school. Casually, in the midst of a mundane morning routine, he asked her to marry him.
“She hates surprises, and I knew that if I tried to set up any big romantic thing she was going to know it was coming,” he says. They exchanged their vows on April 25, 2015, at Park View Baptist Church in North Little Rock.
Skylar’s health was declining and she was placed in hospice care shortly after Lindsey and Clint met. During the ceremony, Clint read a message to her about how he was not just marrying Lindsey but that he was marrying into their family. He and Lindsey gave her a bracelet engraved with her new initials.
“Everybody was crying. There were men in there crying who I didn’t even know had tear ducts,” Lindsey says. “It was a very emotional moment.”
Since then, Skylar’s health has improved and the Overmans have welcomed a new baby — Sawyer, 10 months.
Lindsey is a research program manager for the birth defects research section at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and Clint is an administrator with the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
They feel like they are living their happily-ever-after.
“I had my daughter and I had this idea that it was going to be me and her forever and I really didn’t think I would ever get married, then here comes this man who accepts both of us and loves both of us,” she says. “It turned out kind of like my own little fairy tale.”