Are you in the Richmond 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 Richmond.

The Fan, Monroe Park and the students around them

Virginia Commonwealth University sits right in the city, around Monroe Park and the edge of the Fan District, and its students shape a lot of Richmond’s dating life. The Fan’s rowhouse streets are full of students, recent graduates and people who came for school and never left. Dating in that crowd moves fast, and it often overlaps. Friend groups share apartments, bars and sometimes the same matches.

Many VCU graduates stay in the area, which means a post from a man’s student years can still be sitting in a group that his current dates belong to. The University of Richmond, out in the West End, brings a separate student crowd, and some of its graduates end up living in the Fan a few years later.

Carytown, Scott’s Addition and nights out

Away from campus, Carytown has the restaurants and the long strip of shops that make it an easy first-date choice, while Scott’s Addition has turned old warehouses into breweries and bars. Church Hill and Shockoe Bottom have their own regulars, and Manchester, on the south bank of the James, has filled in with new apartments and people who meet along the river. Richmond is compact enough that the same people turn up in the same places, and a woman who wants to know more about a man may well ask the groups covering Richmond before she asks a friend.

Short Pump, Midlothian and the counties around the city

Much of the metro lives outside the city line. Short Pump, out in western Henrico, is a common base for people who work in the suburbs, and Midlothian in Chesterfield County draws families and young professionals to the southwest. Mechanicsville, in Hanover, sits to the north, and Petersburg and Colonial Heights, down I-95 to the south, are close enough to count as part of the same area. People in those places date across the whole region, and they tend to drive into the city for it.

Between DC and the beach

Richmond sits where I-95 and I-64 cross. Head north on I-95 and you reach Fredericksburg, Northern Virginia and Washington. Head east on I-64 and you reach Williamsburg and Hampton Roads, then Virginia Beach. Plenty of Richmond men have dated along one or both of those roads, or moved here from one end of them, and groups in those areas can overlap with Richmond ones more than you might expect.

How a Richmond check is carried out

First come the groups covering Richmond, then the surrounding county groups and those in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, wherever your history makes it plausible. When you order, there’s room to list other places you’ve lived or dated, and we’ll search those groups as well.

The report reaches you within 24 hours. One way or another, you’ll have an answer to put the question to rest.