Are you in the Pittsburgh 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 Pittsburgh.

Rivers, hills and a lot of bridges

Pittsburgh’s geography does a lot of the sorting. The Allegheny and the Monongahela meet downtown to form the Ohio, and the hills, bridges and tunnels around them break the city into neighborhoods that feel separate even when they’re close. Lawrenceville runs along the Allegheny, the South Side sits across the Mon, and Shadyside and Squirrel Hill lie east of Oakland. Getting from one to another can feel like a bigger trip than the map suggests. The inclines up Mount Washington, the busways and the light rail to the South Hills all help, but most people still drive, and tunnels and parking quietly decide where a date happens.

That shapes dating. People often match beyond their own neighborhood and meet somewhere neutral, which means a woman unsure about a date may have nobody in common with him to ask.

Oakland, the universities and the hospitals

Oakland holds Pitt and Carnegie Mellon side by side, and the two campuses bring in students, graduate students and researchers from all over. Many leave after a few years, but plenty stay for jobs in the city. The region’s large hospital systems are among its biggest employers, so a lot of men here work shifts as nurses, residents or technicians, and they often date on the apps at hours when everyone else is asleep. Because the hospitals and universities share the same few blocks, a nurse, a postdoc and an undergraduate can all be on the same apps within walking distance of each other.

A city people come back to

Pittsburgh is also a place where many people grow up, leave for a while and come back, or never leave at all. That gives dating here a small-world quality. A woman may discover that a man she met online grew up on her cousin’s street, or plays in the same league as a coworker. In a city like that, a post tends to be seen by people who know the man, not just by strangers.

Looking past the obvious groups

Beyond the groups covering Pittsburgh itself, there are several smaller ones, including one run in a looser style than most, and a post can show up in any of them. We go through each of the groups covering the city and its suburbs, then the Pennsylvania-wide groups, so nothing depends on a single place. If you’ve also dated in State College, Erie or somewhere farther away, note it on your order and we’ll cover those groups too.

An end to the guessing

Small-world cities tend to make rumors travel fast and answers arrive slowly. A written report gives you the answer first, so you’re working from what is actually there rather than what someone thinks they saw.