Are you in the Rochester 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 Rochester.

A mid-size city where circles overlap

Rochester’s main group, Are We Dating The Same Guy? | Rochester NY, has about 53,000 members. In a metro this size, that reaches a lot of the women who are actively dating, and it means the distance between strangers is short. The woman who posts about a date may share a gym, an employer or an old school friend with someone in the comments, and the man in the post can turn out to be someone a few members already recognize.

That closeness cuts both ways. People here often hear about a post secondhand, from a coworker or a cousin, before they see it themselves. Word can travel faster than the post.

Two campuses and a lot of graduate students

The University of Rochester and RIT bring a steady flow of students, researchers and staff into the area, many of them from outside the region. The University of Rochester sits along the Genesee River south of downtown, and RIT is out in Henrietta. Graduate students and young staff rarely keep their dating on campus. They match with people from the city and the suburbs, and the main group is where women from both of those worlds overlap. Some stay in Rochester for years after their degree, so the student crowd and the local crowd blend more than you might expect.

Park Avenue, the South Wedge and the suburbs

In the city, a lot of first dates happen along Park Avenue, in the South Wedge around the East End or in the Neighborhood of the Arts. Then there are the suburbs, each with its own feel: Pittsford and Brighton to the southeast, Webster out along the lake to the east, Greece to the northwest. A man living in Greece and dating in Pittsford is still well within the same group, because women across Monroe County tend to join the Rochester one rather than anything more local.

Weekends in the Finger Lakes

In the warmer months, a lot of Rochester social life heads south on weekends, to Canandaigua and the other Finger Lakes. Wineries, lake houses and summer weddings put people from Rochester alongside people from Syracuse, Ithaca and further afield. A date that starts by the water can be mentioned in a group well outside the city.

Starting with the main group

We search the Rochester NY group first, then its smaller backup group, which some members use alongside the main one, and then the Finger Lakes and statewide groups a Rochester post would most likely reach. If you’ve spent time in Buffalo, Syracuse or anywhere else, mention it when you order and we’ll widen the search to cover it.

Either way, you come away with a clear picture, and you get it without having to ask anyone you know.