Are you in the Indianapolis 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 Indianapolis.

Mass Ave, Fountain Square and Broad Ripple

Indianapolis spreads out, but its dating life tends to collect in a few places. Mass Ave, the diagonal street running northeast from downtown, is lined with restaurants and bars, and downtown itself, around Monument Circle and the canal walk, fills up on weekend evenings too. Fountain Square, southeast of downtown, has its own crowd and its own feel. Broad Ripple, farther north along the canal, has long been a nightlife spot, and the Monon Trail ties it to the neighborhoods and suburbs beyond. Most people drive between them, and a lot of first dates happen in whichever one is halfway.

Carmel, Fishers and the northern suburbs

A large share of the metro now lives north of the city in Hamilton County. Carmel and Fishers have grown into busy suburbs with their own restaurants and their own dating scenes, but many people there still treat Indianapolis as the place to go out. Women in those suburbs often join the groups covering the city as well as any closer to home, so a man in Fishers can come up in an Indianapolis search. Farther out, Noblesville, Westfield and Zionsville are growing the same way, and the drive in on I-69 or US-31 is a normal part of a date.

Graduates moving in from Purdue and IU

Indianapolis draws many of the state’s college graduates. Purdue, in West Lafayette, and Indiana University, in Bloomington, are each about an hour away, and plenty of their graduates move to the city for a first job. Butler University adds students in the city itself. That leaves a lot of men here with dating history in two places, a college town and the city they moved to, and both can matter.

Convention weekends and race crowds

The city also fills up regularly with visitors. Large conventions bring crowds downtown through the year, and race weekends at the Speedway bring many more. Hotel staff, servers and bartenders who work those events keep long hours and often date on the apps between shifts. People in town for a few days use the apps too, and a woman visiting from elsewhere is more likely to post in her home city’s group than in a local one. If you’ve met someone that way, it changes where a post would sit.

What an Indianapolis search covers

We start with the groups covering Indianapolis, then the surrounding suburbs and Indiana as a whole. If you met someone from out of town, or you’ve lived in Bloomington, West Lafayette or another state, list those places on your order and we’ll search their groups too. That way you end up with a full picture of where you stand rather than a guess based on one group.