Urban Tribes: are friends the new family?
Ethan Watters Bloomsbury, 214pp, £10.99
ISBN 0747565872
At one point in the mid-to-late 1990s, Bridget Jones's Diary was making the bestsellers list; Channel 4's Friends was becoming a national craze; and Tesco was reporting astonishing sales of a new range of meals-for-one. As any columnist will tell you, three of a kind is all it takes to declare a trend, and so a new idea was born - family life was finished, and the future was friends.
It seems scarcely believable, then, that Urban Tribes should be the first book to ask: Are friends the new family? The question has inspired such a mountain of articles that you cannot help but wonder what Ethan Watters can add. A single, late- thirtysomething San Franciscan, he began writing this book when he realised that his group of friends "had not only provided me with consistent emotional support but had come to influence every choice I made in life, from how I comported my romances to the risks I took in my career". They had come to function as a substitute family, far more intimate and influential than the one into which he'd been born.
Watters discovered he was not alone. He set up a research website, and was flooded with responses from other Americans who said that they, too, belonged to urban tribes. Chuck from Cleveland described his as "a wonderful collection of individuals who genuinely care about each other. We ourselves are the only cool thing." Chris from LA wrote of his multiracial group of friends, "When we go out to dinner we look like the UN." Some of these groups had draconian membership rules, such as banning intra-tribe dating, and one operated its own website. Within most, a clear pattern of roles emerged, with different members playing the part of organiser, child, guardian, cook, host-ess and so on. "We're like a bunch of Amish people," wrote Karen from Seattle. "We're always helping each other out, painting houses, planting grass, fixing heaters, mending cars."
While Watters concerns himself with establishing whether these tribes constitute bona fide substitute families, I found myself preoccupied with how annoying they are. It is not just the boastfulness that is unattractive, or the tone of glib confidence verging on smugness. These tribe members' descriptions sound like customer testimonials for a product - as if, having chosen to invest more time and value in friends than family, they have confused the two for rival brands. The friends-as-family theory is in essence a consumer-driven idea.
Urban Tribes could have usefully investigated the interest that the market has in encouraging us to swap allegiance from family to friends. Watters assumes that his generation's preference for extended single life is born of unprecedented freedom, but does not explore the economic forces guiding that choice.
The archetypal urban tribe member, ultra-modern, unfettered by family ties, linked only to a social network of people like himself, is not a vision of freedom but a marketing man's dream. He will stay longer in the office, and spend more money when he leaves. His boss will never come second to the demands of a teething baby. His impulse to buy a plasma TV will never be cooled by the thought of his child's savings account. And as his friends have jobs, too - and also want plasma TVs - they always understand him.
Watters marvels at the heterogeneity of the various tribes he discovers, but fails to identify one conspicuous similarity: friends are always going to be roughly the same age as each other. If I decided to swap my family for friends, all meaningful contact with anyone over 65 would end. From a business perspective this would be no bad thing, for what's the use in old people? Pensioners do not typically urge youngsters to spend more, save less and work longer.
The left has traditionally been wary of the nuclear family. It is a capitalist invention of the industrial revolution, designed to create pliant workers and hungry consumers. Since the 1960s it has been cast as the enemy of individual freedom, a prison for wives, a persecutor of gays, an engine of conservatism. The idea of ditching it for a network of friends of our own choosing is undeniably appealing. But if the family is the only serious alternative to leading lives devoted to working and spending, we would be rash to think of getting rid of it.
There is a great deal in Urban Tribes with which single, metropolitan, twentysomething and thirtysomething readers will identify. But not even the most sophisticated urban tribes that Watters found had managed to overcome the crucial design fault of friendship - the liberty to leave.
Throughout, Watters's tone is curiously apologetic, and in the final chapter we discover why. While writing his book, he withdrew from his own urban tribe, going part-time, as it were, if not quite resigning. What had happened? Watters had fallen in love.
All at once, his tribe became much less important. Some members were hurt, but he felt they were "overreacting". His chief concern was how to get them out of his spare bedrooms so he and his girlfriend could have the flat to themselves. "The 'us' in my world," he confesses, "has shrunk to mean Rebecca and me."
He wrote the last chapter from his honeymoon hotel room in Hawaii. "The sun is shining, I can hear the ocean crashing about, and my wife awaits." Charming as this may be, it doesn't sound like the new anything: more like the oldest happy ending in the world.
Decca Aitkenhead writes for the Observer
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