Are you in the Phoenix 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 Phoenix.

When the main group won’t show up in search

The main Phoenix Are We Dating The Same Guy group doesn’t appear in Facebook search. A man looking for it can type the obvious terms and come up with nothing, which can feel like reassurance when it isn’t. What does appear is a backup group for Phoenix, Mesa and Chandler, and that is only part of the picture.

A group that keeps a low profile in search still has members, still gets posts and still gets comments. Not being able to find it tells you nothing about what is in it.

A valley made of separate cities

Phoenix is the biggest city in the Valley, but it is surrounded by others that are large in their own right: Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert and Glendale. The freeways tie them together, and people drive between them for work and dates without thinking much about it. A woman in Gilbert and a man in north Phoenix can match without either of them treating it as a long way.

Each part of the Valley has its own places to go. Old Town Scottsdale is a common choice for a night out, Tempe has a younger crowd around Arizona State, and downtown Phoenix and Roosevelt Row have bars and restaurants of their own.

Winter visitors, spring training and the heat

The Valley’s population shifts with the seasons. Snowbirds arrive for the winter, spring training brings baseball fans for weeks at a time, and both mean more people on the apps who don’t live here year-round. A man visiting for a few weeks can still end up in a local post, because to the woman who met him he was simply another match nearby.

Summer works the other way. The heat pushes dating indoors, into restaurants, bars and late evenings, and more of the early conversation happens on the apps. Long message threads before a first meeting are common, and those threads are often what gets screenshotted and shared when a woman wants other opinions.

What a Phoenix search covers

We work outward from Phoenix itself, starting with the groups covering the city, including the backup group for Phoenix, Mesa and Chandler, and then the groups covering Scottsdale and Tempe and the Arizona-wide ones. Photos carry most of the weight here, so we search with the ones you upload and the names you give us. If you only spend part of the year in Arizona, or have dated in Tucson or back home, include those places in your order and they will be searched as well.

Not having to guess

When you can’t even see the main group, it is easy to keep wondering. A written report tells you what is there, and that is usually enough to let the question go.