Are you in the Raleigh 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 Raleigh.

Three cities that date as one

The Triangle is three cities that behave like a single metro: Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, with Cary, Apex, Morrisville and Wake Forest filling in around them. People live in one, work in another and go out in the third, with I-40 tying it all together. The Raleigh / Durham group, with about 75,000 members, reflects that. Women from across the region use it, so a man doesn’t need to have dated in Raleigh itself to turn up there.

Research Triangle Park and the people it brings

Research Triangle Park sits between the three cities and employs a large workforce in technology, life sciences and research. The hospitals and universities employ many more. Together they bring a steady flow of people from other states and other countries, often in their twenties and thirties, many of them single and new to the area. In a metro growing this fast, many of the people on the dating apps arrived recently and have few local connections to ask about someone they’ve just met.

That’s part of why the group is so active here. When a woman can’t ask a mutual friend, because there isn’t one, she asks the group instead.

Three campuses, one dating pool

NC State in Raleigh, Duke in Durham and UNC in Chapel Hill keep the population young and always changing. Graduate students, postdocs and medical residents make up a real part of the dating pool, and many stay on after their programs end. Social circles overlap across all three campuses, so a post written by someone in Chapel Hill can be read by people in Raleigh the same afternoon.

A car-first region with a wide radius

Most people here drive to dates, and a typical app radius easily takes in all three cities and the suburbs between them. Downtown Durham, Glenwood South in Raleigh and the bars near the Chapel Hill campus all draw people in from across the Triangle on a weekend night. A man who lives in Cary and a woman who lives in Durham can be a half-hour drive apart and still be well inside each other’s search settings, which is how two people with no overlap in their daily lives end up on a date.

What we check and why

We start with the main Raleigh / Durham group and then move to the others where posts from the same area end up: the groups covering Durham and Chapel Hill, the backup Triangle group of about 6,000 members, and the North Carolina-wide groups. If you lived in Charlotte, Wilmington or another state before moving here, note it on the order form and we’ll cover it too. For a man still finding his footing in a new place, it helps to know what’s actually out there instead of wondering about it.