Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Committment by Ethan Watters, Ethan Waters, Colin Dickerman (Editor)

From the Publisher

The numbers can't be ignored: the current generation of young Americans is delaying marriage longer than any other generation in history. But while the media trumpets this fact in a way that seems designed to scare us, until now no one has really taken the time to understand what people are doing instead.

Driven by his personal desire to understand why his single life stretched far into his thirties, Ethan Watters explores the cultural and social forces that have steered his generation away from the altar-and discovers many reasons to be optimistic about the course his generation has chosen. Central to his thinking is the idea of Urban Tribes: the closely knit communities of friends that spring up during the ever-increasing period of time between college and married life. Tribes are revealed to be the key to understanding this generation, explaining not only why its members are putting off marriage, but also why singles often live outside of families so happily. In the end, Watters makes the case that the tribe years engender the self-respect critical to successful partnerships.

A funny, deeply insightful, and compulsively readable book that dares to suggest that the generation in question just might be interested in more than buying the latest SUV and drinking lattes at the local coffeehouse, Urban Tribes is destined to become one of the most talked-about books of the year.

"This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Urban Tribes redefines the debate over the nature of community and social cohesion in society today. Ethan Watters provides powerful insight into the rise of new kinds of cities and support structures for the growingclass of creative, single people inhabiting leading urban centers in the United States and around the world." -Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

Publishers Weekly

Journalist Watters parlays his 2001 New York Times Magazine think piece and subsequent Good Morning America appearance into a debut book, a sociological examination of the pleasures of a segment of his generation-the "yet to be marrieds" ages 25 to 39. They're the ones who live in bohemian garrets yet feel affluent because their baby boomer parents will probably leave them their money. They host great New Year's Eve parties and travel en masse to the New Orleans Jazz Festival. They're the "Burning Man" generation, drawn like lemmings to the annual desert art festival. Demographers call them "never-marrieds" and say they're one of the fastest-growing groups in America. Most tellingly, in Watters's view, the habit of establishing "urban tribes"-rotating networks of friends and acquaintances-covers all functions formerly served by the traditional family, thus eliminating the need for marriage and intimacy. It's often a white, upper-middle-class, post-college phenomenon (Watters attends a Philadelphia Cinco de Mayo celebration to which, he notes, no Hispanics have been invited), but, finds Watters, "groups that formed later, during the swirl of adult city life, could sometime[s] match the remarkable diversity of those communities." He refutes claims by sociologists that modern youth has lost the civic-mindedness of previous generations by describing urban tribes' "different style[s] of giving back." He also delves into the eternal conundrum of why men don't like to commit, consulting average Joes and psychologists alike, and questions the "stigma of single life." Sure, these issues have been raised before, but Watters's breezy writing and sunny optimism are refreshing, and his evocation of the good times of San Francisco's dot-com boom years has period charm to burn. Agent, Jay Mandel. (Oct.) Forecast: A 10-city author tour and planned print, TV and radio interviews ensure that Watters's playful yet analytical book will get some attention, aided by a blurb from Po Bronson. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

San Francisco-based journalist Watters has identified a social trend worth talking about-the growing number of city-dwelling adults in their late twenties and thirties who have delayed marriage and instead turned to groups of friends for support and a sense of belonging. He has interviewed and corresponded with members of what he calls "urban tribes" from around (and even outside) the country, buttressing his case here and there with various sociological theories. Moreover, however, this is a profoundly personal, nonscholarly work, informed by his experience with his own urban tribe. Watters seems surprised to learn that some (in fact, probably most) young and unmarried people have no such network of friends but instead live rather lonely lives. He seems only slightly more cognizant that members of urban tribes are almost without exception from college-educated, middle-class backgrounds. Urban tribes, he argues, contribute the sort of "social capital" that Robert Putnam has famously claimed is lacking in modern America, but it is equally possible that they simply live more self-centered, less "grown up" lives; the author ultimately fails to resolves this paradox. Suitable for public libraries in large metropolitan areas as well as academic libraries.-David A. Timko, U.S. Census Bureau Lib., Washington, DC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Confessions of a Yet-To-Be Married

"What ever happened to getting married?" I asked a carful of friends. This was half a dozen years ago while we were on our way to Burning Man. The U-Haul trailer we were pulling carried two dozen eight-foot lengths of two-by-fours, thirty bedsheets, a couple hundred yards of rope, thirty cases of beer, and all the other makings for our homegrown art project. Our plan was to string the sheets, à la Christo, along the desert, then offer other Burning Man attendees an ice-cold Sapporo beer for writing a properly constructed haiku on the sheets. Burning Man, a kind of wacky desert art festival, was a yearly event for my group of friends. Along with the makings for our interactive art installation, we had approximately twenty pounds of Gummy Bears, fifteen pounds of Twizzlers, food for five days, three hundred gallons of water, a variety of costumes, and one hundred green glow sticks so we could keep track of each other in the desert night. A total of twenty-five friends were headed from San Francisco across the Sierra toward our rendezvous in the Black Rock Desert that day. Significantly absent among them was Julia, my girlfriend at the time. 

It was because of that absent girlfriend that the subject of marriage had been on my mind, the issue having recently and contentiously come up between the two of us. I knew that others in the car had been thinking about it as well. We were all in our late twenties or early-to-middle thirties, yet none had found brides or husbands. Although we were all older than our parents were when they had us, the idea of having children ourselves still seemed a far-off abstraction that came up only when someone asked whether we "wanted" children.

There was a growing sense among us that our postcollege/prefamily life was stretching into an awfully long time -- five, ten, almost fifteen years for some -- and that maybe we had missed a turn somewhere. Our parents, having suffered through introductory dinners with a half-dozen to a dozen prospective mates, were becoming concerned. They worried for us, or, if they were less generous or more eager for grandchildren, accused us of being "slackers," a word they had come to understand from listening to public radio.

Jen, a fast-thinking criminal defense lawyer who was often first out of the block with her notions, answered first.

"Women have their own careers and resources and they no longer need the institution of marriage to survive," she said. Jen had grown up in middle-income New Jersey but had managed to shake off most of the trappings of that life in her hipper, less-permed California incarnation. "It's simple economics. Most women still want to get married, but fewer women feel like they have to. Besides, we have those things to help open jars now."

"It's the breakdown of tradition in the city," said Adam, a documentary filmmaker and true child of left-wing Berkeley. "Our families can't force us to do anything anymore, and the church has even less power. We put ourselves first now. We can't get married because we're tragically selfish."

"It's simpler than that. We're not getting married because it's no longer required before having sex," offered Josh, a tall, handsome underachiever who was always pragmatic when it came to sexual issues and opportunities. "You know, if the milk is free, who's going to sell the cow?"

"You mean 'buy the cow' -- 'no one wants to buy the cow.'" Jen said, hitting Josh on the back of the head. "It's a wonder you get any milk at all." 

"I think our generation grew up with too much marital carnage," Alice offered tentatively. A graduate student in her late thirties, she was new to our group and was still getting the hang of how we talked about the world. "We spent our adolescence ducking and covering as families up and down the block went off like bombs. We get post-traumatic-stress symptoms just going home for Thanksgiving, like revisiting a combat zone."

I paused, as they waited for my theory. I could see that all their ideas had merit. But even though it was true that the idea of marriage had lost some of its traditional importance and had been grievously damaged by the ice-storm divorces of the seventies, we all claimed that we still desired it. We often talked of marriage as if it were the finish line of this leg of life's race. There seemed to be something more going on with our delay, something getting in our way.

"I've been thinking that, for me, the problem is you guys," I said, pausing to let that sink in. "I mean, how would I get the momentum up to get married when I'm always hanging around with my friends? I spend more time talking about my love life with you all than I do having one."

"And I thought Julia wasn't coming on this trip," Josh said in a stage whisper to Jen. "But look, he's channeling his girlfriend for us."

"You know what my dad was doing when he was my age?" I continued, a little riled by Josh's comment. "He had a steady job, he was married to my mom, and they were having me. I can also tell you what he wasn't doing: He wasn't driving to the desert with two dozen of his friends to build a haiku-for-beer camp."

"Worse than channeling," Jen said with mock concern. "I think Julia's possessed his body. Ethan, are you in there? Quick, someone call a priest."

As annoying as they were, my friends were right. I was speaking for Julia, who had recently, in a series of intense arguments, all but convinced me that my life was stuck. It had started because the weekend of Burning Man had conflicted with her best friend's wedding in her hometown of Athens, Georgia. I had ill-advisedly suggested that my group's yearly pilgrimage to Burning Man was equally important to me as the wedding of her friend was to her. Not only would Julia not concede this point, she found it jaw-droppingly bizarre that I would even make such a comparison.

The fights became intense because the wedding-versus-Burning Man debate was emblematic of Julia's belief that my friends were stunting my growth -- delaying my graduation to a more adult existence. She would list the details of my life as if that conclusion were obvious. In my early thirties, I was a freelance writer making a hand-to-mouth living. I shared a large flat with a Zen monk, a musician, a filmmaker, and three other people. I insisted on being at the Rite Spot restaurant every Tuesday night, when my group of friends would meet for dinner. I attended so religiously that I would schedule trips not to miss these Tuesday gathering. Julia had one or two close friends, but she couldn't see the point in carrying on, as I did, with a group of two dozen. "Your life is Seinfeldian," she told me, "except with all Georges. You know what that show is about? Nothing."

Was my life about nothing? I had to admit that Julia made a convincing case, and I was vulnerable to the criticism. My life often felt like a montage of happy, often slapstick, scenes, but I couldn't make the case that it had much of a plot. There I was holding the boom microphone on the set of a friend's independent film. Cut to a scene of my group of friends lounging in the moonlight on the roof of a houseboat listening to Noah play the guitar. Cut to the shared dinners or the roommate meetings or the writing groups . . . it didn't matter how you strung these scenes together, they didn't add up to any narrative I knew.

I wasn't joking about the idea that my friends were the problem. It would be hard, after all, to realize that your life was off track if everybody in your frame of reference was similarly derailed. Like myself, my friends were all leading busy and upbeat postcollege/prefamily lives. They lived alone or with roommates and worked along in their careers. In their love lives, they suffered through two- year cycles that went from singleness to crush to relationship to heartbreak and back to singleness. We absolved ourselves from these failures by believing that we just hadn't met the right person. Hope springs eternal with romantic desire, and that "right person" excuse was easy for us to accept as individuals. But as we stepped back and saw that everyone around us was delaying marriage, that excuse was harder to swallow. Were there no "right people" left? An unsettling Twilight Zone-ish feeling was creeping in as we were exceeding the age our parents were when we first knew them.

I had never planned to live my twenties and early thirties in this manner. After college, my girlfriend and I moved to a low-rent neighborhood of San Francisco assuming that we were in a brief transition period between college and marriage. We lived together for one year and then another. We waited as if the decision to get married would decide itself on its own. It didn't, and she eventually left me to move on to graduate school. Being young and full of hope at the time, I assumed the problem was with the timing and discontents of that particular relationship and not with me. I began searching the city for my true love, assuming that this wouldn't take too long.

I didn't know it back then, but I was a harbinger of a massive trend. Like most modern singles, I wasn't just looking for a suitable spouse; I was soul-mate searching. Although I disliked the phrase's New Age connotations, I counted myself among the 94 percent of my fellow never-marrieds who, when asked in a Gallup poll, agreed that when you marry, you want your spouse to be your soul mate first and foremost. Along with my friends, I discovered that searching for a soul mate wasn't so easy. Although I dated smart and charming women, the soul-mate standard I tried to apply was so elusive in my own mind that any disgruntlement could become a reason for the big what-are-we-doing? talk. I wasn't looking for that certain something, a friend once cruelly observed, I was looking for that certain everything.

Copyright © 2003 Ethan Watters