In 2018, researchers from Utrecht University interviewed several dozen people who had found a co-parent through online platforms. One of the most consistent patterns: people described the first meetings as deeply awkward — not because the other person was bad, but because there was no cultural script for how this was supposed to look. Not a romantic date, not a job interview, not a business meeting. Something fundamentally new.
This awkwardness has consequences. People either retreat into small talk, dodging important topics. Or they launch straight into legalities and finances — and the conversation becomes cold, distanced. Between these two extremes lies a workable format that needs to be found.
Start with mistakes, because almost everyone makes them. The first: trying to cover everything at once. A first meeting physically cannot contain the entire co-parenting conversation. It is not a decision-making meeting. It is a meeting for initial assessment: is there enough here to continue the conversation? That's all. The second mistake: asking exam questions. 'What would you do if the child fell ill during an important business trip?' sounds like a trap, not a conversation. People close down, start answering 'correctly' rather than honestly. The third: avoiding difficult topics altogether. If someone at a first meeting sidesteps money, parental rights, time-sharing — that's either a cultural reflex or a signal. Important to know which.
Good questions at first meetings are open, concrete and without a right answer. Not 'do you want the child to be religious?' (nudges towards agreement) — but 'tell me what role religion played in your family growing up.' Not 'how involved do you want to be?' — but 'describe what a typical weekday with a five-year-old would look like for you.' Concreteness matters. Abstract questions about values produce abstract answers. Concrete scenarios produce concrete responses — and it's in the response to a specific scenario that you see the person, not in a declaration of values.
Family psychologists identify several key indicators that are hard to fake and easy to miss if you don't know what to look for. First: how someone talks about conflicts in their life. Not whether there were conflicts — there always are. But how they describe them. Is someone else always to blame? Is there room for personal responsibility? Second: how the person responds to disagreement during the meeting itself. If you gently disagree with something — how do they receive it? Third: how willing they are to sit with uncertainty. Parenting is full of situations without a right answer. A person with a ready answer for everything is either inexperienced or insincere.
First meetings with a potential co-parent are a skill nobody teaches, because the situation is too new. Most people learn from their own mistakes. Knowing the mechanisms doesn't eliminate the awkwardness, but it provides orientation: what matters to hear, what matters to say, and when the conversation is moving in the right direction. That's already quite a lot.