This Lindsay Clancy Question Is Becoming A Dating Test

A patient recently told me about his new test for whether a woman is marriage material. It isn’t politics, religion, or whether she wants children. He wants to know what she thinks about Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three children.

At first, I thought this was one man’s unusual dating rule. Then other men in my practice started bringing up the case. A murder case had somehow become a compatibility test.

The question isn’t really about Lindsay Clancy. It’s much more personal: What does your answer tell me about what it would be like to build a life with you?

Some men hear sympathy for Clancy and get nervous. When a woman says, “That could have been me,” they may not hear compassion for severe mental illness. They may hear someone identifying with a mother who killed her three children. Then come the questions: Does mental illness erase responsibility? Where does empathy end and excuse-making begin? If we had children, would I trust this person with them?

A woman may hear something very different when a man reacts to Clancy with nothing but anger. He may think he’s expressing horror at the deaths of three children. She may wonder what his reaction says about how he’d treat her. If I became seriously ill after childbirth, would he understand what was happening? Would he help me or simply blame me?

Neither reaction necessarily means someone lacks empathy. Often the men and women in these situations are empathizing with different people and worrying about different things.

For some men, the Clancy case raises a frightening question about marriage: Can I trust you with our children? For some women, it raises another: Can I trust you if something happens to me? The problem is thinking one opinion can answer either question.

We’re doing this more and more in dating. How did you vote? What do you think about Israel? Transgender athletes? Therapy? We don’t just listen to the answer. We use it to decide whether someone is compassionate, trustworthy, stable, selfish, or safe to build a life with. Now apparently we’re doing it with murder cases.

I understand the temptation. Dating requires making enormous decisions with painfully incomplete information. You don’t know how someone will behave after 10 years of marriage, during a financial crisis, after the birth of a child, or when one of you becomes seriously ill. Yet those are the things you’d most like to know before committing your life to someone.

So people look for clues. A question about Lindsay Clancy becomes a way of trying to learn something that can’t really be known yet.

But people don’t sort that neatly. Someone can believe Clancy was profoundly ill and still believe protecting children comes first. Someone can focus on the children without being indifferent to severe postpartum mental illness. Someone can believe a parent should be held legally responsible and still feel tremendous compassion for her psychiatric suffering.

The trouble starts when an opinion becomes a verdict on the person holding it. “You sympathize with Lindsay Clancy” becomes “I can’t trust you with our children.” “You don’t sympathize with her” becomes “You wouldn’t protect me if I became mentally ill.”

I see smaller versions of this in my practice all the time. “You don’t understand why I’m upset” becomes “You don’t care about me.” “You spend too much money” becomes “You’re irresponsible.” One piece of information becomes an explanation for the whole person.

It’s tempting in dating because everyone wants to know what they’re getting into. But you can know someone for years and still have no idea how he’ll respond to grief, how she’ll handle months of sleepless nights with a newborn, or what either of you will be like when money gets tight. No first-date question can tell you that. And the more we pretend one can, the easier it becomes to confuse agreement with compatibility.

You can find someone who agrees with you about politics, COVID-19, Israel, and Lindsay Clancy. That doesn’t tell you how either of you will behave when life becomes difficult.

The Clancy question may be useful, but not for the reason people think. The important part is what happens when a couple disagrees.  Can you hear an opinion you dislike without deciding it tells you everything about the other person? Can you ask why someone sees the case differently before deciding what that difference means? Can you disagree without immediately wondering whether the relationship is doomed?

Maybe the Clancy question isn’t such a bad one to ask on a date. Just don’t mistake the answer for the test. The person who gives you the “right” answer today will eventually give you one you don’t like. How the two of you handle that moment may tell you far more about your future together than anything either of you said about Lindsay Clancy.

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Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, D.C., and author of the book “Therapy Nation.” Find him on X @JonathanAlpert.

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