You're in your twenties or thirties, still single and enjoying life with your friends and community...there's a sense of satisfaction with how you're living life - even though it's probably not exactly what your parents had in mind. Some of us are thrown at the singles table at weddings, family members lurking in the background, hopeing for a love connection, ready to pat each other on the back for a match well made. Others are luckier - community and family members understand this singles tribe as a group of well-doers; intelligent young people, successful in their own right, striving to better themselves before getting thrown into the throngs of relationships and partnerships that, for some, are still considered chains that bind and prevent personal growth.

1-42 had the opportunity to interview Ethan Watters, author of the soon-to-be-published Urban Tribes (title to be determined) and researcher of community building between the demographic of men and women aged 25-39...

1-42 :: Is your concern with the discovery or definition of Urban Tribes meant to ease the minds of the “still-singles” or “never-marrieds” or is it to just give understanding to a genre of people that is still clearly growing?

EW :: I think to give understanding is to ease the minds of the millions of “never marrieds.” Because we’re the first generation to delay marriage this long there is a general nervousness about what this means. When people understand that they are not alone in delaying – when they get put in a context like urban tribes – they seem to feel much better. “We tell ourselves stories to live …” wrote Joan Didion, and she was right. The never-marrieds haven’t had a story to tell themselves, and that’s made them very anxious.

1-42 :: What do you think about older family members who set you up to think you’re attending a family gathering and then you find yourself seated next to another individual of the same age, opposite sex, and on the road to success? Happenstance?

EW :: Nothing like this has happened to me, thankfully. Over the years I’ve included my mother on tribe events and she has come to understand the importance of these people in my life. Like some other parents I’ve met, she’s a supporter of the tribe. (I know for a fact, however, that she never understood why I broke up with my college girlfriend, who I dated into my mid-20s.) Other parents are not so hip to the idea of their offspring living single throughout their twenties and into their thirties. It is often women who get the pressure and the uncomfortable seat assignments next to the “handsome” pharmacist their mothers corralled into dinner.
The truth is, actually, that parents have largely gotten out of the match making business.

1-42 :: You mention your awareness of what our demographic is NOT doing – i.e. staying in our jobs for too long, finding communities, etc. But, isn’t the beauty of not only our age group but the time in which we’re living reflective of our ability to make choices? That said, I don’t think you’re implying it’s a bad thing, necessarily, but rather that it’s a characteristic of our demo to “flit” about and remain slightly unfocused about issues that clearly meant more to our parents. Will we ever care as much about those things? Is it cyclical?

EW :: Exactly right: our freedom is not a bad thing at all. Here’s a small piece out of my book on the topic:

"Because freedom is an absence of restraints; we didn’t necessarily realize or talk about just how free we were. Only rarely, when we lifted our heads from our lives and looked around at the larger social landscape, did we see that our lives were different. This sometimes happened when we went back to our smaller hometowns for high school reunions or visited our siblings’ families. Mostly, however, it didn’t occur to us that we were different because we were surrounded by people, like ourselves, who similarly had the freedom to treat their lives as if they were one big fun hobby. There was no one above us giving us advice. We were making up our lives as we went along.

There was not even an order in which we were expected to take on life’s challenges. “The predictable sequence of education, stable employment, marriage and parenthood, that marked earlier cohorts of young adults gave way to an increasing diversity of life paths,” wrote two Penn State professors in their book, A Generation at Risk. “For these young adults the options were broader—and the outcomes less certain—than those available to their parents.”

I can hear some baby boomers loudly objecting at this point. “What about the sixties? Weren’t those the times of true generational freedom, when the old status quo was broken and brave new lifestyles explored? Wasn’t that when times were really a changin’?” No doubt, the sixties were a time of change. But for the individual they were still a time of clear social roles and expectations, even if that expectation was to subvert the expectations of the previous generation by rolling naked in the muddy fields at Woodstock. I got this notion from reading Wendy Kaminer who observed, “Anyone who lived through [the sixties]. . . knows that it was a much more self-righteous than relativistic period . . . Even the notorious ‘permissiveness’ of the ’60s reflected prevailing dogmas. . . . The counterculture didn’t eschew moral codes: instead it rejected particular notions of moral behavior associated with the 1950s and replaced them with alternative moralities.” Which is probably why, when the lifestyle of baby boomers swung, in mass, toward yuppiedom, no one was really surprised.

But if we were truly living in a time of unparalleled personal choice, where was all the fanfare? If you think about it, it makes sense that this sort of freedom might have been taking place quietly. As Kaminer implies, when individual freedom becomes the rally cry of the mob, you know you are witnessing something else entirely. (Everybody, chant together: “We are all different!”) The test of freedom would be action, not ideology. Anyone can claim to be free of social constraints but the truest gauge of that freedom is the degree to which individuals in a population choose different paths. Was it possible that my generation was living and struggling with the personal freedoms that baby boomers forged as a generation but individually only playacted?"

My point is that we might have been “unfocused” as a generation, but when I looked into individual lives we were often doing remarkable things with this time (and often with the support of our friends in our urban tribes). Slackers, Generation X, Less than Zero and Brightlights Big City told the story that we were lost or flitting away our young adulthood, but that wasn’t the truth of the matter. It was just a hip pose. My belief is that if you took a closer look we were actually aspiring to build community, find love, create art and give back to each other with un-ironic love and devotion.

1-42 :: “I think all the assumptions about this demographic group are only glosses for the fact that when we don’t understand some change in society we tend to assume that everything we hold dear is about to go down the toilet.” This quote is incredible and on point. Nothing is falling apart – no societal ideals are being extinguished just b/c we’re making different choices more often later in life…did you always feel this way or was it that article it the NYT that really brought it to your attention?

EW :: After reading Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, I think for a time I bought the idea that my generation wasn’t pulling its weight in terms of community building. The statistics he lists are so grave and uniformly negative. So few of us are joining the Lions Club or the League of Women Voters. It’s a pretty damning case. It was only when I stepped back and said, statistics be damned, this is not how I feel. I feel like I’m involved in a community-- I feel like I’m connected to my city. That’s when I looked around and began to form the case that my generation might be giving back in a different way. After finishing my book, I’m bursting with pride for my generation. I think we’re doing remarkable things with our freedom. I think we give to our friends and our community in such a natural way that it sometimes escapes our notice.

1-42 :: Have your perceptions changed in the past year, regarding the meaning of Tribes and their evolution?

EW :: Oh god, yes. Half the book is about how I got it wrong in my original conception. Most importantly, Tribes are rarely the clearly defined “us vs. them” entities that I originally described. While there is often a core group, membership is much more fluid over time than I had suggested. Tribes are designed, in fact, not to ward off the rest of the world but to be constantly integrating new people and connecting to other groups. Tribes turned out to be much more complicated and heterogeneous than I had imagined.

1-42 :: How did you come up with 25-39 as a demo age? Of those 13 million, would you happen to know what percentage is under 30?

EW :: I’m 38 so I wanted to be part of the demographic I defined. I feel like people who get hitched before 25 never really experience the particular rhythms of the tribe years. It was arbitrary. I was identifying my tribe years.

1-42 :: I have a theory. Since we wait longer to make relationship decisions, based on your statistics, we’re spending more time, presumably, learning about ourselves and how we operate individually and in relationships. So maybe what’s happening is that with more time spent on ourselves, we’re more in tune with who would fit our partner profile – making a serious relationship less likely than it would be without this extra time. What do you think?

EW :: I absolutely agree. The early statistics on later marriages tend to support your theory. Later marriages last longer. We’ve always assumed that what a man does in his single years (trying to become a success in the world and become a full-fledged man) had an impact on his value and potential as a mate. I think what is changing now is that we are soon going to see that this is true for women also.
This is the good news for our generations: becoming a well-rounded person on ones own, makes one a better mate if you get married in the future. Put another way, being good at being single does not make you bad at being married. Quite the opposite.

1-42 :: The popular slacker literature of the 90s seems to have waned a bit. I’m noticing a lot more motivational work by people in our age group. For instance, Jennifer Karlin and Amelia Borofsky are two mid-twentyish women who put together an anthology of writings by people in their 20s who are dealing with, specifically, being 20 and not knowing what’s going on as much as they’d like to, touching upon urban tribes (unaware of the terminology, presumably) quite often. You could even say that this collection portrays are knowledge of very little at times, but clearly identifies our level of awareness….your thoughts?

EW :: I haven’t read those books but I’m going to get them right now. I think there are lots of stories to tell about this time and I’m happy to have others on the case. I’m glad I’m not the only one beginning this reassessment of the years we’ve spent outside of families. The evidence seems so overwhelming that we’ve done something special here – something good – that I’d be nervous if others didn’t see it as well. I hope people are interested when my book comes out in the Fall, but I also think there is plenty of room for others to sing the praises of this brave generation.

For more information, check out Ethan's website - UrbanTribes.net

2003 1-42 Online