Are you in the Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia.

A big group in a city of small neighborhoods

Philadelphia is a city of tight neighborhoods. Fishtown, South Philly, Manayunk and Northern Liberties each have their own rowhome blocks, their own corner bars and their own sense of who knows who. You might expect that to keep dating local, but the apps work the other way. They put a man in Manayunk in front of a woman in Fishtown or Center City, and the two of them may not share a single friend.

When a date like that leaves her with questions, the group is where she tends to ask. The Philadelphia group has about 112,000 members, so a photo posted there is seen by a lot of people, and there’s a fair chance one of them recognizes it.

Across the river and out along the Main Line

The Philly dating pool doesn’t stop at the city limits. South Jersey sits just across the river, and towns like Cherry Hill, Collingswood and Haddonfield are a short drive or train ride from Center City. To the west, the Main Line suburbs and Delaware County send plenty of people into the city on weekends, and plenty of city residents date out there in return. A post written by a woman in one of those places can easily end up in the main group, and the reverse happens too.

Students and the people who stay

Philadelphia has a big student population, with University City, Temple’s campus in North Philadelphia and the colleges along the Main Line. Many graduates stay, and start dating seriously in their twenties in the same neighborhoods where they studied. That means a post from a few years back, written by a classmate or a short-lived match, can still be sitting in a group that people around you belong to now.

More than one group to look through

The Philadelphia scene isn’t a single group. There’s a smaller backup group, and a separate group of about 18,000 members that runs in a looser style than the main one. A post can appear in any of them without showing up in the others. We start with the main group and then work through the surrounding groups that women in the same dating pool also use: those two, the groups covering South Jersey, the Main Line and Delco, and the Pennsylvania-wide groups. If you’ve lived or dated in Pittsburgh, New York or anywhere else, tell us on the order form and we’ll add those groups.

Replacing a rumor with an answer

A lot of men start wondering after hearing something secondhand, a friend or a cousin who “thinks she saw you in that group.” That’s an uncomfortable thing to sit on, and asking around rarely settles it. A written answer replaces the rumor with what is actually there, whether that turns out to be a post or nothing at all.