Are you in the Baltimore 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 Baltimore.

Two cities, one corridor

Baltimore and Washington sit close enough that, for dating purposes, they often behave like one region. I-95 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway run between them, commuter trains link the two downtowns, and a lot of people live in one city and work in the other. The dating pool follows the commute. A man in Federal Hill can match with a woman in Silver Spring, and a woman in Canton may be seeing someone who drives to DC every morning.

That’s why the Baltimore / Columbia / Maryland group, with about 70,000 members, overlaps with the DC / DMV groups. Some women belong to both, and a post that starts in one can end up being discussed in the other.

Harbor neighborhoods and the suburbs around them

Inside the city, much of the dating life centers on the neighborhoods around the harbor: Federal Hill, Canton, Fells Point and Locust Point, with Mount Vernon and Hampden further north. Towson, just over the city line in Baltimore County, has a large student population and a bar scene of its own. Columbia, the planned community in Howard County, sits roughly halfway between Baltimore and DC and draws people from both directions, and the group names it alongside Baltimore.

Annapolis and Anne Arundel County

To the south, Annapolis brings a different crowd: state government, the Naval Academy, sailing, and a historic downtown that fills up on weekends. Anne Arundel County as a whole runs from the edge of Baltimore down along the Chesapeake Bay, and people there can just as easily end up dating in Baltimore, Annapolis or DC.

People who live in one metro and date in the other

The corridor creates a particular kind of dater. He might rent in Baltimore because it’s more affordable, work near DC, and meet women on both ends of the drive. Or he might live in Howard County and treat both cities as his own. For a man like that, a post is just as likely to appear in a DC group as a Baltimore one, and checking only one side leaves half the picture missing.

We start with the main Baltimore / Columbia / Maryland group, then search the other groups that a post tends to travel into: the DC / DMV groups, the groups covering Anne Arundel and Howard County, and the Maryland-wide groups. If you’ve lived somewhere else, or you spend weekends in Philadelphia or on the Eastern Shore, mention it when you order and it goes into the search.

Both ends of the corridor

If you live between the two cities, it’s natural to wonder which group a post would be in, or whether it would be in both. You don’t have to work that out yourself. A written answer that covers both ends of the corridor tells you what’s actually there, and that is far easier to live with than a guess.