Are you in the Syracuse 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 Syracuse.

A group that won’t show up in search

Syracuse is one of the harder cities to check on your own, for a simple reason: the main group doesn’t appear in Facebook search. Type in the name and you may get nothing at all, or only smaller groups covering other parts of the state. For a man who wants to know whether he’s been mentioned, that’s a dead end before he’s started, and asking someone else to look is not something most men want to do.

The groups covering Central New York are still active. They’re just hard to reach from the outside.

The rhythm of the student calendar

Syracuse University shapes a lot of the city’s year. The area around University Hill fills up in late August, empties out over winter break and goes quiet for much of the summer. Dating tends to follow the same pattern, with the busiest stretches at the start of each semester, when new students, graduate students and staff arrive and start using the apps. The university also employs a lot of people who live here year-round, and they date across the whole metro, not just near campus.

Armory Square and the suburbs north and east

Downtown, Armory Square is where many first dates happen, with bars and restaurants packed into a few walkable blocks. Beyond that, Syracuse is mostly suburbs reached by car. Liverpool sits on Onondaga Lake to the north, Cicero runs up toward Oneida Lake, and Fayetteville lies to the east. People often live in one suburb, work in another and meet in the city, so a woman posting about a date may live a fair distance from the man she’s asking about.

Utica, Ithaca and Fort Drum

Central New York is spread out, and so are its groups. Utica is an easy drive east on the Thruway, and Ithaca, home to Cornell and Ithaca College, is close enough to the south that people date between the two cities. Up I-81, Fort Drum brings in soldiers and military families, and many of them come down to Syracuse on weekends. Military life means people arrive and leave on short notice, which is one reason a post can surface after a man has already been reassigned.

Our search for a Central New York man

We start with the main Syracuse group, the one that doesn’t come up when you search, and then go through the groups covering Central New York, Utica, Ithaca and the state as a whole, the ones a post about a man here would most likely travel to. If you were stationed somewhere else or lived in another city before Syracuse, list it when you order and we’ll add those groups.

It’s a way to stop wondering about a group you can’t even see.