Are you in the Columbus group?

“Are We Dating The Same Guy” is a network of private Facebook groups, each one tied to a city or region. Women join the group for where they live, post a photo or a screenshot of a man they’ve met or matched with, and ask whether anyone else knows him. Here is how that works in Columbus.

A group you can’t search for

Plenty of men in Columbus try to look for themselves and stop at the first step. A search on Facebook turns up a Central Ohio group, but the main Columbus group doesn’t appear in search at all, so there is nothing obvious to find, let alone join. That alone is why many men here hand the job to someone else.

Ohio State is part of the city

Ohio State’s main campus sits a short way north of downtown along High Street, and its size shapes the whole city. Students, graduate students, staff and the many alumni who stay after graduating make up a large part of the dating pool. For a lot of men here, dating started on or near campus, and the people they met then are still around, now living in Clintonville or Grandview or working downtown.

That overlap matters. A woman who posts about a date may share a graduating class, a former roommate or a football Saturday with many of the people reading it, and someone in the comments may well know the man.

From the Short North to the outer suburbs

The Short North, the stretch of High Street between downtown and campus, is where a lot of first dates happen, with galleries, restaurants and bars within a few blocks of each other. German Village, south of downtown with its brick streets, tends to draw a slightly older crowd. Beyond the city, Dublin to the northwest, Westerville to the northeast and the newer subdivisions around them have their own rhythm, and many people who live there drive in on weekends. The I-270 outerbelt rings the whole metro, so a match in Gahanna or Hilliard is rarely a long trip, and people date across the full circle without much thought.

Columbus has also been growing quickly, with young professionals moving in for jobs in insurance, finance, state government and healthcare. New arrivals tend to rely on the apps more than on mutual friends, which makes a group a natural place for a woman to ask about a man she doesn’t know much about.

Covering Central Ohio properly

Our search starts with the groups covering Columbus and Central Ohio and then widens to Ohio-wide groups, which is where posts from the suburbs and smaller towns often end up. If you’ve also lived in Cleveland, Cincinnati or anywhere else, there’s a space for it when you order and we’ll search those groups as well.

Setting it to rest

Wondering whether you’re in a group you can’t even find can sit at the back of your mind for weeks. A written report replaces that with something definite, and you can decide what, if anything, comes next.