Are you in the Portland 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 Portland.

One group for most of Oregon

Portland’s group is named for Portland, Salem and Oregon as a whole, and its reach matches the name. With about 88,000 members, it brings women from the city, the suburbs, the Willamette Valley and smaller towns into the same feed. A woman in Salem and a woman in Southeast Portland can see the same post within minutes of each other.

That breadth cuts both ways. One large group covers a lot of ground, which helps when you want a clear answer, but it also means a post can be read by people a long way from where the date happened.

East side, west side

Portland dating often follows the river. The east side, with neighborhoods like Alberta, Hawthorne and Division, has a different feel from the Pearl District, Northwest and downtown on the west side, and people cross the bridges in both directions for dates. Further west, Beaverton and Hillsboro have a large tech workforce, and many of those men come into the city on weekends to meet people.

Because the metro is spread across several cities and two states, the woman who posts often has no mutual friends with the man. She asks the group what it knows, usually with a profile photo and a first name, and other members add what they have seen.

Across the Columbia

Vancouver, Washington, sits just across the Columbia River and is part of the same metro area. People live on one side of the state line and work or date on the other, so a man in Vancouver can easily show up in the Portland group, and a Portland man can show up in a southwest Washington one. State lines don’t mean much to a dating app radius. Commuters cross the bridges every day, and on weekends plenty of people from southwest Washington come into Portland for dinner, music or a date. That traffic runs both ways, and so do the posts.

What a Portland check covers

For a man who lives or dates around Portland, we start with the main group and then search the surrounding groups close enough to matter: Vancouver and southwest Washington, Salem and the Willamette Valley, and the Oregon-wide groups. If you have spent time in Bend, on the coast or up in Seattle, put it in the order notes and we’ll widen the search.

Settling the question

A match that went quiet or an odd remark from a friend can sit in the back of your mind for weeks. A check replaces that with something definite, and a clean result settles it just as well as any other. It also lets you get back to dating without second-guessing every match.