First of all, thanks to Ethan Watters for sharing his sources and updating this blog yesterday more than it’s been updated for quite a while! The Virtual Book Tour moves on today to Geoffrey Long’s Inkblots.

Now, I absolutely meant to post this last night, when I had Mr. Urban Tribes himself in residence, but I left it on my computer at work, so here it is today, a day late and a dollar short. But I went to so much trouble writing it that I want to put it up, even if I think it’s pretty rambling and incoherent. Let me tell you about my tribe…

In the book, Watters (gee, the guy’s blogged on my site, let’s call him Ethan) points out that since his/our generation has mostly eschewed the traditional social groupings of its elders (church, social clubs), the rise of the “urban tribe” was inevitable.

I’m a fairly unique case, then. I’m a confessed social junkie. I love people. And I’m a member of a church. I grew up, in my late teens and early twenties, as part of a large and dynamic church youth group. I also live in a large city (3 million plus), so even though, as a rule, church people tend to marry younger, by and large most of our group didn’t marry until their mid-to-late twenties. But it was more than marriage that slowly pulled our “tribe” apart.

Churches (and more especially youth groups) bring together a huge variety of people. People who share faith but not necessarily politics or opinions. A particularly nasty “tribe”-bomb for us was the “coming out” of one of our members. Another converted to Catholicism. Others drifted away from their youthful faith. Still others found their youthful faith and idealism hardening into the social conservatism of their parents. In a group where beliefs are important, the social aspect just wasn’t as appetizing as it was when we were going on hayrides and playing volleyball.

On the other hand, I appreciated the fact that I never had to conduct my social life in the bars and clubs of my city. Most of my friendships, even the ones that were later broken, had enough depth so that matters like faith and politics and ethics could be discussed openly. It was easy to form very strong ties with some of these people.

I suppose we were like animal rights activists or Greenpeace members. We were very idealistic, and the compromises that become inevitable with age and experience led to disillusionment, if not with ourselves, then with others.

It hurts to think of how we’ve scattered. Some of the blame is due to the regular stuff: marriage, careers, real estate. Those losses ache with the dull ache of mortality, growing older and apart. But the ones that hurt most are the ones that were the sharpest. Betrayals, self-righteousness, the growing realization that some of us have changed, or haven’t. Among this community, it is still difficult to figure out which are the virtues: staying the same or changing. Integrity (or just rigidity?), compromise (a good or a bad thing?), principles (or just rules?), tolerance (or just looking the other way?), honesty (or just spite?).

Sometimes I see the fallout from a group like ours as more of a broken marriage than just a social group disintegrating. We disappointed one another. We weren’t the people we thought we were. We grew out of each other.

And then some of us got married. We left one complicated web of relationships for a single complicated relationship. Our choice of partner probably influenced the group’s opinion of us. Our partner had an opinion of the group, too. By its very nature, marriage forced us to leave (the group) and cleave (to our partner). In most cases, this just means “growing up,” giving up some of the “boys/girls nights out”. But in our case, it also meant shutting the door a little more on some of those old relationships. Or opening it, though the time and effort required usually found us just not bothering.

It’s my belief that the friends we make in our teens and early twenties (roughly from junior high until the end of our undergraduate years) are the ones we most desire to keep. That’s certainly been borne out in my own life. Though I’ve been a member of several churches since those heady youth group days, none have ever produced the sort of relationships I crave. People are much more guarded as they age, and that frustrates intimacy.

The closest I’ve come (and it’s not that close, believe me) is the film club that my wife and I began about two years ago. We invite a wide cross-section from among both our groups of friends to a monthly film screening in our home. It’s non-threatening because during the film no one really talks, and there’s no expectation that you have to stay for long afterward. But some people do, and that’s where we get closer. The only problem so far is that the people staying late are people who are already in our close circle, and that may be intimidating some of the others. But we plug away, month after month, hoping that our persistence will convince our acquaintances that we really do want them as friends. And some of the people that I invite are actually members of that old tribe. No matter what has happened between us, my faith (and my heart) dictates that I should never just fold my arms across my chest.

from Consolation Champs

My Tribe

This chapter documents how people’s love lives and tribe lives can come into grave conflict. Not many links to point you to here because I relied on the personal stories of people who struggled to make the transition from tribes to families. There is good news. The divorce rates appear to be going down. Experts have pointed to stronger, later marriages as one factor. Even though we’ve delayed marriage longer than any generation in American history, we might also be the generation that saves the institution from irrelevance.

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Eight: Love Versus the Tribe

Over the last ten years women have often been blamed for the marriage delay. “Women are not behaving correctly” was the subtext of books like The Rules^*. Conservative commentators similarly believed that women had been the cause of the death of courtship. Chief among these doomsayers were Patrick Buchanan (who still has his site up for his 2000 presidential campaign).

There was also Leon Kass’ essay “The End of Courtship,” in which he said ridiculous things like, “In the present climate, those increasingly rare men who are still inclined to be gentlemen must dissemble their generosity as submissiveness.”

My case was that courtship hadn’t died but changed. As a generation we were not cynical about marriage, we were just very cautious. It was true that, if we were going to spend a decade of our young adulthood outside of marriage, we were going to have a good amount of out-of-wedlock sex. But that didn’t mean we had abandoned the idea of marriage. There was evidence, in fact, that we were holding marriage to a higher standard—taking it more seriously—than previous generations.

^*My Top Five Stupidest Lines from the Rules can be found here.

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Seven: Women and the Marriage Delay

In this chapter I go looking for my personal reason (excuse) for reaching my mid-thirties and still being single. I travel to the American Psychological Association’s national convention and criticize the work of William Pollack and David Lisak who were arguing at the conference that all male commitment issues came from bad socialization. I was sure socialization wasn’t the whole story. This led to my brief affair with the work of evolutionary psychologist David Buss. He argued that many of the differences between men and women in romantic relationships came from our pre-wired evolutionary desires. I thought he was right but eventually realized that evolutionary psychology was not helpful in finding (or understanding the meaning of) love.

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Six: Men and the Marriage Delay

The fifth chapter marks a major shift in the book. I turn my attention to why my generation is experiencing the marriage delay. I visit the American Association of Single People. I chide them a little for using the word “single” in the name of their organization. I get the executive director Tom Coleman to admit that he has had trouble with the word because so few people seem to want to label themselves as open-endedly “single.” Perhaps he took our conversation to heart because the organization is now called “Unmarried America: An Equal Rights Organization.”

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Five: The Stigma of Single Life

Here I try to make the case that my generation is actually good at building community. Mainly I take aim at Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, where he argues that this generation of young adults has not done its part in creating “social capital.” It’s true that we’ve not joined the community groups our grandparents belonged to but we’ve done something more interesting and harder to document. We’ve created community among networks of friends. This has led to what I call “social dark matter.” The community building that goes on among these networks of friends is difficult to document but it creates a force that binds together whole cities. I cited Critical Mass as an example of how this social dark matter can suddenly become visible. Since the book came out there have been more examples, like flash mobs, Friendster and Tribe.net We seem to be coming to understand how these loose networks of friends can have an impact in the world.

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Four: How Tribes Connect a City

In this chapter I try to figure out how groups of friends help the individual become their best self. Some amateur scholars helped me understand what Aristotle meant by “friendship in the good.” I also talk about how my group helped support our friend Nik Weinstein as he created one of the largest lighting installations in the world.

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Three: On Friendship and Risk

The second chapter starts with my dawning understanding that the initial article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine got the idea of the urban tribe all wrong. The groups weren’t “tight knit” as I claimed but much looser and more porous. Hundreds of people who filled out a survey on my site alerted me to this mistake. These groups both protected us from the swirl of city life and connected us to it as well. In the end of the chapter I write about Robin Dunbar’s research in which he suggests that we gossip as a form of grooming each other and expressing solidarity. We can maintain larger groups than apes because we can gossip with (aka groom) more than one person at a time.

from Consolation Champs

Chapter Two: Understanding the Urban Tribe

The book starts at the annual arts festival Burning Man. It was at Burning Man that I suddenly saw that my group of friends added up to more than the sum of the individual relationships. It was a (drug-free) insight that started me thinking about writing the article that led to the book. In the first chapter I also begin to describe my tribe and its influence in my life. There are some pictures of my group here. I also begin to look at some data on the marriage delay. Much of that came from The Rutgers Marriage project and from talking to the charming and smart Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who I don’t always agree with but always enjoy interviewing.

from Consolation Champs

Intro and Chapter One: Confessions of a Yet-to-be-Married

Here are some chapter by chapter links relating to my book Urban Tribes. In the book I try to write in the style of the best conversations I’ve had with my smartest friends. As I say in the book:

The links, chapter by chapter, should prove this point.

from Consolation Champs

Some Places I Went While Writing Urban Tribes

Everybody welcome Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment. Ethan will be guest-blogging today, talking a little about his research for the book. Please use the Comments to engage him in discussion.

from Consolation Champs

Welcome Ethan!

Today marks the beginning of another Virtual Book Tour. This time around, it’s Ethan Watters’ book, Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (buy it from Powells.com). I’ll be participating this time, but haven’t yet received the book. Come back on Thursday November 14 to welcome guest blogger Ethan Watters himself as he comments on many of the sources he used for the book. It promises to be at least 4.7x as interesting as anything you may have read here recently.

from Consolation Champs

Virtual Book Tour 3