Swipe Right, Swipe Left!

Many people have joined an online dating service at some point in their lives.  This is the best way I can explain the experience of picking the donor for our future kiddo. 

The process of searching for the right donor reminded me a lot of being on a dating site.  You identified the characteristics of the future donor that are important to you to generate a list of potential donors.  There is no limit to the types of characteristics you can select.  There are the normal things you think of like ethnicity, hair color, eye color, height, and weight.  Then there other characteristics you don’t think about right away like their religious affiliation and the types of hobbies they have.  The list of characteristics you chose from has almost anything you can think of on it.  Once you have selected the characteristics that are important and generated the list of donors that match then you read through the profiles.  Just like a dating service, you only have access to a small amount of the profile without paying.  Brittany and I used the free information to create our favorites list.  Once again, this process is much like a dating service by clicking on the heart to add to potential donor to your favorites.  When you remove a donor from your favorites list the little heart breaks. 

So the first thing Brittany and I did when picking a donor was to determine which characteristics we wanted the donor to have.  Our thought process was to pick a donor with characteristics similar to mine since I was not going to have any biological impact on the baby.  We selected all the things we were looking for in a donor; Southern and Eastern European ancestry, hazel eyes, brown hair, college education, athletic, minimum of 6 foot tall, previous pregnancies, and CMV-.  The first list had other characteristics on it, but I cannot remember all of them of the top of my head.  After selecting all the characteristics we clicked search.  To our surprise, there were no matches.  The lesson learned was that we were not going to find a donor with everything we wanted, so we had to decide which characteristics were the most important. 

The more we thought about it, many of the characteristics we selected for the first search were characteristics that were not determined by biology but were things that are learned through their raising.  So we decided to focus on the biological characteristics.  Once we did this our search generated a list of about 15 to 20 possible donors.  We then started the process of reading through the profiles and medical history and created our favorites list.  This whittled the list down to 10. 

From the list of 10, there were two that quickly made it to the top of the list based on the short profile and medical history.  The funny thing about each of them was the fact that neither one of them looked anything like me.  They both had dark brown hair with brown eyes and darker skin tone.  However, Brittany and I liked what they said in the profile and the medical history and we liked their baby pictures.  Of those two, there was one that stood out.  He was a triathlete, in college, cute baby, and had a clean medical record. 

Once it was time for us to pick a donor, we paid for the 3 month subscription to the site.   This gave us access to the entire profile and medical history for all of the donors.  This also gave us access to adult pictures of the donors if they had them. 

When we had access to all the information the list of 10 started to shrink really fast, and the top two candidates fell from the top fast.  Now some of the top 10 were taken from the list because they no longer had sperm for IUI.  This left us with six to go through.  Here is the moment we might sound a little superficial…the first full profile we opened was a donor who did have a life series of pictures.  This means there are photos from infant to adulthood.  Brittany and I first looked at the pictures.  The young man was a cute infant and toddler, but his appearances as an adult was not what we expected.  After this, we decided we might want to stick with donors that included an adult photo.  Even though we had decided to go with donors with adult pictures, the donor that was at the top of the list before we had full profiles did not have an adult picture and we still decided to go through his in-depth profile to see if we still liked him.  Simply put, he fell from the top quickly.  His grades in high school and college were not very good, which to me translates to a lack of motivation and drive.  The final piece of the puzzle that made us decide he was not the right one for us was his full audio interview.  I believe you can tell a little bit about a person when you listen to them talk.  His answers were short and did not seem to have a ton of thought behind them.  I was almost instantly turned off from him once the interview started.  With the top two off the list now, we carefully went through the remaining donors on our favorites list. 

After going through all of the profiles, there was one that stood out and he had to be the donor.  If the goal was to find someone like me then this was the one….except I do have to admit he might be a little smarter than me.  The donor we picked is between the ages of 18-22…does younger mean better swimmers?  He graduated in the top 10 of his class in high school and scored high on his SAT and ACT tests.  He also played baseball and football in high school and was inducted into his high school Hall of Fame for baseball.  Currently, he is attending college majoring in Economics with a double minor in Environmental Studies and Math.  He also plays baseball and football in college.  As for his physical appearance, he had blond hair as a toddler with blue eyes.  As an adult he has brown hair.  He has an athletic build and is very handsome.  Finally, the results of his personality test were almost identical to mine.  All of the characteristics that were similar to mine and a clean personal and family medical history, it was no question this was the donor for us. 

Brittany and I are excited about the possibility of becoming parents!  This has been something we have been talking about for a while now, and now that we have a donor and sperm ordered it is becoming closer to reality!  The time for all the preliminary testing is over and now we start the process of getting pregnant!