Have you found your Urban Tribe?

I've always found it interesting how groups of friends are formed. My core group of friends have been friends for about 2 years now and it's funny how it's never really deviated. There have been additions with current boyfriends or old friends coming around again but mostly it's the 5 of us.

Last summer, we had weekly "Family Homo Evenings" where each of us would plan something fun that we all had to participate in as a way of us always hanging out with each other. There has been talk about doing it again this summer because of the fun we had last year but so far no one is willing to commit. (Gay men not willing to commit? Crazy!)

Part of this, I believe, is what has happened in that year.

The article below describes (I've only copied some of the article, click on the post title to read the entire thing) what I'm going through in my life right now. My friends are my family. My "real" family doesn't live here so it's hard to have their support. So, I turn to my friends. They are my family.

Matt and I were talking the other night about how to make friends. He said, "I have no idea where to meet new people." And it's strange how that is for a lot of people.

Where do you find friends?

Take your current really-close, best friends and think about where you met them. Most of us meet friends in 3 different areas: work, school, and other social groups we belong to.

Work friends are sometimes hard to get close to. When I first moved to Salt Lake, there were a few friends who I was with 24/7--work, play AND school.

Yet, after we graduate from college, we stop making school friends. It is very rare for someone to still be close friends with the same people they went to high school with or even met when they first started college. I believe that the friends we make while in college are the friends we will be friends with for the rest of our lives. By the time we've finished school, we have some sense of who we are and what we want out of life and the friends we have made are quite similar to us. Naturally, it just makes sense that you will be friends with them for life.

Brady recently moved to San Francisco and was expressing to me last night how hard it was to meet people AND make friends with them. He thought it would be so easy and he'd have a ton of new friends. Instead, he has only met guys who want to hook up with him and a few people from Utah. How do we meet people that we want to form long-lasting friendships with? Furthermore, which is more important: continually working on making new friendships or working on keeping old ones strong?

Honestly, I don't know what I'd do without my friends--even the ones who don't live here anymore. Yet I know that we will all be friends for a really long time.

And that is something that makes me very happy.

Between graduation and marriage, young adults are moving away from their families and building 'urban tribes' - support groups built around friendship

By Christy Karras
The Salt Lake Tribune

When an uninsured member of Adriane Colvin's urban tribe had a brain aneurysm, the tribe - a group of friends that served as her substitute family - was there to help. They arranged her doctor visits, helped her around the house and started a fund to pay her medical bills.

"It was just an amazing outpouring of support," Colvin said. But she wasn't surprised: The tribe has been supporting its members' needs for years.

Such groups of adult friends usually don't call themselves tribes, or even think of themselves that way. All they know is, when they need someone to help them move the furniture, give dating advice or plan a home-cooked meal, they often turn to chosen families rather than biological ones.

"They evolve so organically that you don't recognize the social momentum they contain," said Ethan Watters, whose book, Urban Tribes, popularized the term and the idea. "People begin telling stories about 'This group did this.' . . . Once it gets to that point, you can remove a person from the group, and it doesn't change the group. It's highly clustered. You can actually graph it and see how this works in vast numbers of lines between people."

How do you know you're in a tribe? Watters says, "Go down the list of things your family used to do and ask, 'Does my family do this for me, or do my friends?' " Who vets potential dates? Whose shoulder do you cry on if you've had a bad day?
"You begin to see the family is still culturally important, and yet a lot of those day-to-day things have been taken over by friends," he said.

More and more, people spend their college and post-college years moving away from their hometowns, marrying later and focusing on interests and careers. Nationally, the U.S. Census reported last year, the average marriage age for women has risen 4.7 years in the past three decades, to about 26, while the age for men at first marriage is up 4.3 years, to 27.4. In Utah, the averages are lower, but those numbers are skewed by the high number of Mormons who marry early (according to Utah state data, for example, three-fourths of people married before age 20 had LDS ceremonies).

Lacking a built-in family or church support system, unmarried adults such as Heidi Falk create their own.

Falk's tribe originated when several friends moved from Illinois to Utah to snowboard. She came to visit and fell in love with the place. Now, the group has grown to include friends and significant others from Utah and other states. "I'm not really a person to, say, go to the bars to look for people, but we always like to add new people to the group," she said.

The dozen or so men and women, most in their late 20s, see each other several times a month and spend holidays together. "Even those . . . who have family here spend the holidays with us, as well as with their families," Falk said.

For its members, the tribe has been a godsend. "I'm grateful because right after college, this is what happened," said Falk. "It provides me with lots of stability - and it's also just fun."

Without families nearby, traditional family roles - matchmaker, confidant, adviser - are taken over by friends. "If you go back to basics, there's always a memory, in your DNA, of living in tribes," said Colvin, who organizes events for the Burning Man festival in Nevada, an event frequented by urban tribes, including several in Salt Lake City. "The power of a tribe is that the members of a tribe suddenly figure out who they are and figure out their gifts and what they can give to this society."

A tribe "serves as a place where there's no judgment, a community of like-minded people," she said. For her, the tribe is another kind of family.

If you've read until the very end, leave a comment and congratulate me. This my 100th post on this blog.