In your tribe

Young people are staying single longer because they are so fulfilled by their network of friends, says journalist Ethan Watters in a new book. Has he touched on a generational phenomenon, or did he just write a book about his Burning Man crew?

By Sheerly Avni

Oct 13, 2003 | It's 7 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ethan Watters and I are at the Rite Spot, a cheap, popular, moderately Bohemian hangout in San Francisco's Mission district, well known for its good lighting, great music, and terrible food. Tonight the place is almost empty, but we're a bit early -- this is just a quick pit stop before we meet up with Watters' friends for their weekly softball game. A San Francisco journalist and author of the new book "Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment," Watters is agreeing with me that a lot of people might be pretty skeptical about the premise of his book -- that loose networks of close friends, or tribes, sustain each other emotionally and professionally for the years in between college and marriage, and that the strength of these tribes is a particularly new phenomenon.

"If someone comes along and says, 'Hey, you and your friends -- you're in an urban tribe,' the response is pretty much, 'Fuck you, I'm not in a tribe,'" he admits. "I appreciate that. I just want to begin a conversation about this. And I hope the book is the beginning of that conversation."

The conversation Watters refers to actually began in 2001 with an article in the New York Times Magazine, in which he suggested that people were staying single longer in part because they drew so much sustenance from their friends. Using his personal experience as a jumping-off point, Watters said that members of urban tribes (his coinage) spend their 20s and 30s roaming the cities, fixing each other's leaky faucets, planning dinners and weekly "Survivor"-watching parties at each other's houses, and -- in San Francisco, at least -- helping build hovercrafts for Burning Man. The period between college and marriage, he argued, was becoming longer not only because of declining economic and social pressure on women to marry, or boomer kids' notorious fear of divorce, but because tribes themselves were so fulfilling. The book expands on the article, and paints a much less bleak picture of single urban life than, say, "Sex and the City," or "Fight Club."

I'm 33, single, and moved to San Francisco eight years ago from a small town. Like Watters, I have a group of friends to whom I've said, many times, and not only under the influence of pharmaceuticals, "Man, you guys are like my family ..." But my initial response to his book was, "Fuck you, I'm not in a tribe."

The 39-year-old Watters is affable, easy to talk to, and well prepared for my objections. Tall, handsome, now married and expecting a child of his own, he describes the book as his attempt to make sense of the past 20 years of his life, a memoir of sorts, but one that he thinks taps into a larger cultural phenomenon. So far, not all reviewers have agreed. In a piece in the Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan writes that Watters and his tribesmen "might be representative less of a striking new social trend than of arrested development." (Rule No. 1 for aspiring West Coast trend-writers: If you want to be taken seriously, don't open the book with your epiphanies from Burning Man.) After we order, I ask Watters what's so novel about his brand of tribes as opposed to say Michel de Montaigne's famous 16th century musings on friendship, or the Bowling League, or the Algonquin circle, or the man-boys in Barry Levinson's "Diner." What's he saying that the slogan from "The Big Chill" didn't tell us in 1983,that "in a cold world, you need your friends to keep you warm"?

"What's different now," he says, "is that a bigger chunk of our generation is spending time outside of the family unit -- both the family that raised them, and the one they might one day make after marriage -- but even more importantly, they are doing it for longer than any group in American history." Glaringly absent from Watters book are hard numbers to back up claims like these. However, the latest Census figures, even though he doesn't cite them, do show that people are marrying later -- the median ages of first marriage was 25.1 for women and 26.8 for men in 2001, up from 20.8 and 23.2 respectively in 1970 -- but there is no evidence to suggest that later marriages are proliferating because people are spending more time hanging out with their close friends.

After his New York Times piece was published, Watters set up a Web site, Urbantribes.net, and asked people to write in with their own stories -- in part to gather research material for his book. Thousands of people responded, and not surprisingly, they, like Watters, were overwhelmingly white, college-educated and relatively well-off. "We lack a lot of socioeconomic diversity," wrote Jamie, about his Washington, D.C., tribe. "But are internally varied in most other ways."

Throughout the book, and in conversation, Watters refers to "our generation," though as far as I can tell, he's not describing a generation at all, but a specific demographic: yuppie liberals with lots of disposable income who live in destination cities, people who hate to be thought of as a demographic.

When asked whether he thinks his tribal theory fits poorer urban neighborhoods, where groups that substitute for family are referred to as, uh, gangs, he reminds me that his book only describes one man's experience. "This may sound like a bit of a cop-out," he says, "but it was, like, lemme figure out what's happened in my life for the last 20 years, and let me try to draw in everyone else who seems to sort of, you know, identify with me."

Well, it does sound like a cop-out. Especially since the book does not bill itself as a memoir, but rather makes the hefty promise of explaining how a generation is "redefining friendship, family, and commitment." But when I try to pin Watters down on any of these questions, he reminds me, again, that it's "just his own experience."

Part of what Watters is trying to debunk in his book, and rightly so, is the still popular conception that American men and women suffer from a Peter Pan complex, an extended adolescence in which we hold onto juvenile ideas of "freedom" because we are so afraid of the responsibility of adulthood. Maybe that's because adulthood is still rigidly defined by the holy triumvirate of Marriage, Mortgage and Kids. What Watters offers up is clearly something different. But still, a social identity based on belonging to a specific group of people doesn't sound like a huge step forward -- in fact, it sounds like high school for adults, with no graduation in sight.

"What's the difference between a tribe and a clique?" I ask, just as Watters' friend Noah arrives at our table to take us to the softball game. Watters tries to dodge the question: "Uh, Noah, you want to field this?"

A fellow tribesman to the rescue: "A clique is exclusionary," says Noah, curly-haired and serious. "A tribe is inclusionary."

Next Page: I am chastised for asking people if they are members of Watters' "tribe"

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