Meet the new extended family

When sisters Pesha and Anya Rudnick tried to re-create the lifestyle they had known as children growing up in Venice Beach, they found they couldn’t afford it on their own. So they teamed up with a childhood friend and bought a triplex in the Oakwood section. The three women share keys, a joint checking account and a communal outdoor space where they have barbecues. But the relationship is not just about making ends meet.

All three are clear that they chose this “Friends”-style life because they love and prefer it. And their bonds aren’t limited to each other. They’re close to a group of about 20 friends, give or take breakups and the addition of newcomers.

Call it the new nuclear family. Or better yet, the stopgap family. As middle-class, mostly white singles put off marriage longer, many are forming broad but tightknit friendships -- think coed fraternities without the alcohol binges, siblings without the rivalries, family by choice not accident of birth. In small groups and large, linked by career interest or hometown ties, these “urban tribe” members live together, eat together and socialize together.

“Compared to earlier generations, Americans today live longer, have fewer children and spend a longer proportion of their life span as single adults than they do in continuous marriage,” write sociologists David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in their annual report for the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. And when people do decide to get married, it’s later in life: an average age of 27 for men and 25 for women, up from the early 20s in the 1960s, according to the Census Bureau.

It would seem many twentysomethings watched their “Ice Storm”-like parents suffer through divorces and decided adulthood American-style did not look fun. “We watched our parents not fulfill their own natures, or living separately in the same house. So many of us delayed marriage. We are a generation with remarkable freedom to create lives on our own timelines,” says Ethan Watters, who documents the rise in group living among friends in his recent book, “Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment” (Bloomsbury Books).

Watters, a 39-year-old freelance writer for such magazines as Spin, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Details, lived in such an arrangement himself for 10 years and became intrigued by it. He wrote a magazine article about his lifestyle with his friends and soon was hearing from thousands of people with similar stories to tell.

With no sociological training but armed with personal insights, Watters expanded the idea into a book, visiting various friendship groups, finding them to be more common in cities and among college-educated singles. He recorded their social rituals, their mating habits, their taboos and financial arrangements -- and dubbed them urban tribes.

Watters found that the last few generations have faced a strange abyss in their early 20s: leaving one family but not yet committing to starting one of their own. The longer marriage is put off, the more the need for close relationships and support mechanisms grew. And once ensconced in these replacement families, members are often content to stay there well into their 30s.

It’s a social shift still on an upward trend. In the last three decades, writes Jason Fields, author of a 2000 study called “America’s Families and Living Arrangements,” the number of nonfamily households (excluding people who live alone and couples without children) rose from 1.7% in 1970 to 5.7% in 2000.

Watters chose his own upper-middle-class demographic to study “because I felt better equipped to figure it out,” he says. Indeed, several sociologists and reviewers were not happy about that. “It’s a hard group to feel concern or empathy for,” Watters admits. “I find myself apologizing for them and then getting annoyed at myself. My group is not homogenous.”

After an internship at Harper’s magazine, Watters moved to San Francisco, where he joined a writer’s group called the Grotto, with Ethan Canin, Mary Roach, Laura Fraser and Dave Eggers. He found the availability of nice but expensive shotgun flats lent itself to group living and rent sharing. He bought a house and invited a friend to live with him. More friends joined, mostly career-oriented fellow New Yorkers who had gone to school together.

He and his friends found they had more time to spare hanging out, working on projects, making stuff. He didn’t really even notice this “thing” in his life until his early 30s. If he had seen this coming, he says, he might have created something more distinct.

“I’d like to encourage single people to think more broadly, to take their love and devotion out into the city, to focus it outward and use the extra 10 years they have wisely,” Watters says.

To be sure, there have been cliques and tribes among young adults in generations past -- close college friends, hippies, beatniks. But urban tribe members tend to live together (or near each other), vacation together and allow the group to expand to include friends of friends. And they aren’t in rebellion against social mores. They’re not even antimarriage.

Just the opposite, in fact, Watters says. This generation of adults seems more determined than ever to make a perfect marriage, he says, so they’re taking their time, being far more cautious in making that commitment.

“Seeing our parents ... has inspired us to try something different,” says Megan Mathews, who shares the Venice triplex with the Rudnicks. Mathews works at Sony Pictures in the production accounting division. Pesha, who shares her apartment with her boyfriend, and Anya, work in theater and education. They are all pretty, enthusiastic, arty and clean-cut. Their apartments are those of adults, organized and tastefully decorated (though Mathews’ still has a touch of that dorm-room quality of someone who works late hours). “I love this lifestyle,” says Mathews. “There’s always someone home.”

All three are slightly uncomfortable with the word “tribe,” which connotes the enforcement of a single ideology or religion. But then, Watters too is ambivalent about the term’s ability to encompass the phenomenon he describes. “These things have an organic resistance to being branded,” he says, making them seem more raffish and revolutionary than they do in his book.

The Rudnicks grew up with an extended family upbringing. Their artist parents created a collaborative, cooperative environment in their community, so they’re glad to be emulating the wide-open family approach to their lives.

Steve Scaia and his friend Kenchy, who goes by one name, met while working on NBC’s “The West Wing.” They formed a group with friends, all in their 20s, many of whom had graduated from Emerson College in Boston and moved to Los Angeles to work in one form or another of media. More loosely defined than the Venice tribe, Kenchy and Scaia’s tribe is also a bit bigger as more people filter in, with about 50 members.

Their financial arrangements are also looser; Scaia purchased the Studio City condo that several members live in, but, as Kenchy describes it, “we all help him out with the mortgage.”

For Kenchy, the life choices Watters writes of ring true. “The differences between our generation and our parents’ generation are just becoming clear. Our view of life is not as simple as it seems,” he says.

Emily Bracken, 28, belongs to two tribes, one in New York, where she went to high school and college, and one in L.A., where she came to work two years ago.

While the New York group shares similar backgrounds, she says, the L.A. group shares common career interests. She lives in the Miracle Mile area, within walking distance of four of the eight core group members, all of whom have their own apartments.

“We’re all moving up together,” she says, “it’s not like we’ve already made it.” Group members, all of whom work in some form of creative media, whether it’s screenwriting or interior design, are in their 20s. They get together once a week, go to plays or parties and make connections with other groups.

Bracken finds the constant availability of close friends takes some of the sting out of not finding true love. “You don’t need a man,” she says, “because you’ve got plenty of male friends.”

Kenchy’s girlfriend, Melinda Valente, notices that couples have begun forming within the group and are beginning to split off on their own, something Watters also notes in his book, confirming this as a gap-filling lifestyle rather than something stronger.

For tribe members, knowing a love interest has passed the standards of the group helps some feel secure in their choices. “I’m terrified to date outside the group, much less sleep around,” Mathews says.

But within most of the groups Watters visited, there were strict if unspoken taboos on sleeping with other group members. It just made everyday life too complicated.

“I was terrified,” Watters recalls of his tribe, “to date inside my own circle.”

Two years ago Watters, met and fell in love with someone outside the group. Rebecca, a psychologist, had to earn the tribe’s acceptance, much like an old-fashioned family giving its children away to be married. They were married by a tribe affiliate, Po Bronson, the cultural writer and buzz-maker. The couple recently welcomed a daughter into their new, traditional, nuclear family.

So has he suddenly been pushed through a door with “adulthood” marked over it in neon letters? “It’s not the end of the adventure,” he says. “It used to be a house, a spouse and a baby. Is that still what it is? We don’t know.”