After months of waiting, the email arrives: "You have a match! A video call is scheduled for Tuesday." Then comes the panic: what do we ask? What do we wear? What if it's awkward? Deep breath. Let's make sense of this important meeting – which is far less a job interview and far more a first date where both sides already quite want it to work.
First, the meeting's real purpose: it's not information gathering. The information – medical history, family situation, previous experience – you already have from the profile and the agency. The purpose is to answer the one question paper can't: is there chemistry? Is this a woman you'll be glad to get a message from every week for a year and a half, laugh with when it's funny, and go through the hard moments with if they come?
So what do you talk about? Life. Her kids, her work, what weekends look like, why she chose surrogacy (the answer to that question is worth more than the entire profile!), what her family thinks, what a successful journey looks like to her. And tell your story too – your path, what this baby means to you. Surrogates choose parents no less than you choose them, and what moves them is almost always the connection to your story.
What must be discussed, even if slightly awkward? Expectations for the relationship: communication frequency, presence at appointments and the birth, and contact after delivery. You don't have to finalize everything in the first call – but you do need to confirm you're pointed in the same general direction. Gaps like "they wanted a daily call, I wanted a weekly update" are exactly what this meeting is meant to surface. As for the truly heavy topics – views on termination, number of embryos per transfer – make sure the agency aligned those in advance; the match meeting is not the place to discover such surprises.
And the common mistakes? Turning the call into an interrogation (there's an agency and there are documents – let the conversation flow); presenting only your perfect version (she's assessing fit too – let her meet the real you); and ignoring gut feelings. If something feels off, even when everything looks perfect on paper – pause and check. A match is not a train you're forbidden to step off.
My tip: prepare three good open questions in advance, then... put the page down. The best calls I've seen are the ones where the list was forgotten after five minutes because it simply flowed. And if by the end you found yourselves talking about recipes or dogs – that's exactly the sign you were looking for.
