The First Meeting: 5 Helpful Tips for Surrogates & Intended Parents
The first meeting between a surrogate and intended parents is unlike almost any other introduction in life. You’ve been matched — carefully, deliberately — by a team that has read your files, reviewed your history, and made a clinical judgment that you belong together. And yet, the moment you’re face to face for the first time, none of that paperwork quite captures what it feels like.
Meeting your surrogate for the first time tends to bring a mix of emotions that most people don’t expect: warmth, nerves, gratitude, and something harder to name — the weight of what this other person has agreed to do. For surrogates, there’s often a mirror image of that feeling. They’ve seen photos, read a profile, and said yes. Now comes the real beginning.
This article walks both sides through what to expect, what helps, and how a physician-led matching process sets up that first conversation for success from the start.
Key Takeaways
Why This Meeting Is Different From Any Other
Most first meetings involve a degree of social performance — you present your best self, keep things light, and see if the other person feels like someone you want to know better. This one is different. By the time surrogates and intended parents sit down together, the big decision has already been made. What’s left is the human part.
According to research on relationship formation published by Psychology Today, the quality of initial interactions between people who share a high-stakes goal has a deep impact on the relationship that follows. In surrogacy, that pull is amplified. Gestational surrogacy is one of the most medically sophisticated ways a family can be built — and one of the most human.
The agency’s role isn’t just to facilitate the match — it’s to create the conditions for that first meeting to go well. At Physician’s Surrogacy, our team prepares both sides in advance, shares profile information ahead of time, and stays available throughout the introduction process. You’re not walking into that meeting alone.
Before the Meeting: How to Prepare
A little preparation goes a long way. Review the other person’s profile before the meeting. Not to quiz them, but to walk in with some sense of who they are — what they value, what their family looks like, why they’re here.
Write down two or three questions you genuinely want to ask. Open-ended ones work best. “What made you decide to do this?” carries more weight than “How many kids do you have?” — you likely already know the answer to the second one. The first opens a conversation.
If you’re meeting via video call, test your setup the night before. A dropped connection in the middle of an emotional introduction can break the mood in ways that are hard to recover from. Five minutes of prep eliminates that risk entirely.
For surrogates meeting intended parents remotely, the same advice applies in reverse. If you’re meeting at your kitchen table while your kids are napping, that’s completely fine — it’s real, and the intended parents will likely find it reassuring rather than distracting.
Meeting Your Surrogate for the First Time: A Guide for Intended Parents
Intended parents sometimes arrive at this meeting with a mental checklist — understandably so, after everything it took to get here. Resist the urge to run through it. Your surrogate isn’t interviewing for a job. She’s agreed to carry your child, and that agreement was built on the matching process, not on a single conversation.
Keep the first meeting relational. Ask about her life, her kids, what she does in her spare time. Share something about yourselves beyond the fertility journey — your work, your home, what you’re looking forward to doing with a child someday. These conversations matter.
The RESOLVE National Infertility Association notes that intended parents who establish genuine rapport with their surrogate early tend to report measurably better emotional outcomes throughout the journey. That’s not a small thing.
Meeting Intended Parents for the First Time: A Guide for Surrogates
For surrogates, the first meeting can feel oddly more nerve-wracking than the application process. You’ve said yes. You’ve been matched. And now you’re about to meet the people whose family you’ll help grow — and that’s a lot to hold in a single conversation.
The most important thing to remember: intended parents are not judging you. They’ve read your profile. They chose you. What they’re hoping for now is exactly what you’re hoping for — that this feels right.
You can read about what motivates other surrogates in Olivia’s surrogacy journey, one of our community stories that speaks to exactly this moment. Many surrogates describe the first meeting as the point where everything became real — in the best way.
Setting Communication Expectations Early
One of the most practical things that can come out of a first meeting has nothing to do with emotion: communication groundwork. How often will you check in? Video calls, texts, or coordinated updates through the agency? What milestones matter most — scans, heartbeat confirmations, delivery?
There’s no single right answer, and that’s the point. The gestational surrogacy process spans many months. The relationship between surrogates and intended parents works best when both sides know what to expect from each other — not through assumption, but through an actual early conversation.
At Physician’s Surrogacy, our coordinators are available 24/7 throughout the journey to help facilitate communication and address any friction that arises. But the tone is set by the people involved, and a first meeting is the best time to set it.
The average match at Physician’s Surrogacy happens within one week — compared to the industry standard of 6–12 months. That speed is made possible by our pre-screened surrogate pool and physician-led matching process. When you meet your surrogate, you can feel confident that the match itself was deliberate, not rushed.
What Physician-Led Matching Means for Your First Meeting
Most surrogacy agencies match intended parents and surrogates based on profile preferences and availability. We go further. Physician’s Surrogacy is the only surrogacy agency in the U.S. managed by practicing OB/GYNs — and that shapes every part of the process, including how matches are made.
Our Advisory Board — specialists in maternal-fetal medicine, neonatal care, and OB/GYNs — review surrogate medical histories as part of the matching criteria. By the time a surrogate and intended parents sit down together, the medical and psychological groundwork has been laid by a team of physicians, not just a coordinator with a checklist.
For intended parents, that means the person across from you has already been evaluated by the same clinical standards you’d expect from any high-quality fertility program. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) sets guidelines for surrogate screening — our protocol exceeds those guidelines.
For surrogates, it means you were matched with intended parents whose expectations, goals, and circumstances were reviewed before you ever received their profile. You’re not walking into an unknown situation.
The Match Comes First. The Meeting Follows With Confidence.
Surrogacy sits where modern medicine meets profound human generosity. At Physician’s Surrogacy, we believe both sides deserve to enter that first meeting with confidence — in each other, and in the process that brought them together.
Our preterm delivery rate is 50% below the national average.
That outcome starts with the physician-designed screening that happens long before the first meeting — and continues through every step of the journey.
After the Meeting: What Comes Next
Most first meetings — including meeting your surrogate for the first time — end with something unspoken: a shared sense that this is going to be okay. Sometimes it’s a hug. Sometimes it’s just a long exhale in the car afterward.
After the meeting, your coordinator will follow up with both sides and gather any initial feedback. There’s no obligation to give a formal verdict immediately — relationships don’t work that way. If something felt off, that’s worth raising. If everything felt right, the next steps in the surrogacy process begin to move forward.
For surrogates, the surrogacy guide covers what to expect at each stage after matching. For intended parents, our team walks alongside you on the emotional side of surrogacy — not just at the beginning, but throughout.
And if you haven’t reached matching yet — if you’re still in the early stages of learning what this process involves — schedule a free consultation with our team. We’ll walk through where you are, what the path looks like, and what to expect.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Julianna Nikolic
Chief Strategy Officer Julianna Nikolic leads strategic initiatives, focusing on growth, innovation, and patient-centered solutions in the reproductive sciences sector. With 26+ years of management experience and a strong entrepreneurial background, she brings deep expertise to advancing reproductive healthcare.
