After you've lived in New York City for a long enough period of time, you start to notice patterns. Most recently, I've felt a big change on the horizon - with September 11 behind us, life was returning to normal (or at least as normal as life gets in NYC, which is technically not very normal.) I have a loyal network of friends with whom I do everything from taking yoga classes to setting personal goals to bar hopping. In the six plus years I've called this city my home, I've formed a new family. Since most people I've gravitated towards here have put off marriage and having children, we find that in our friends we have found the warmth and camaraderie that the majority of people our age in this country find through more traditional venues. I have a carefully chosen network of only the best people in my life -- it's my second family. Alas, as happens with traditional families, sometimes people move away. In 2002 I find myself in the same exact position in which I found myself in 1998 -- some of the most special members of my family are leaving NYC.

In the fall of 1998 I was experiencing an overwhelming onslaught of change -- I resigned from my position at a traditional market research company to take the plunge into uncharted internet territory. I was also moving from 106th Street to 83rd Street in one of the most hurried and stressful moves of my life (the market was so awful that we ended up in an apartment in which my bedroom had no windows -- that's what $2400 a month could get you in 1998.) My father was undergoing a rigorous yet life-saving bone marrow transplant in Seattle. To top it all off, in a time when I needed support and felt like everything around me was changing, several of my best friends left town, the most upsetting of which was my friend Shevaun.

Shev, a native Brit, had arrived in NYC only a month after me in the summer of 1996. Together we had navigated the city and its nightlife with the curious nature of new world explorers who didn't require sleep. I adopted her Anglo-isms, she adopted my assertive capacity to return a sub-par entree. Her departure was my first taste of how transient this city really is -- no one, it appears, lives here forever. In fact, since most people come to New York expecting to stay a year or two or the most three (myself included), it's quite remarkable that I've befriended people who are in their fourth, fifth, sixth year or more here. In fact, I have friends in New York who left and came back-- the ultimate windfall.

Now I find that the itch has started again. My roommate Aaron, my best friend from home Jayme, and my partner in crime and contributor to this website Jen, are all heading west over the next couple of months. Arizona calls Jayme, San Francisco beckons Aaron, and LA seduces Jen. Although the promise of larger apartments, less expensive rent, and access to ocean and mountains sounds amazing to me, I realize that it's not my time to go. So yet again, I am left holding the I Heart NY bag, empty from the imminent departure of so many wonderful people who I am lucky to call friends.

Now here's the weirdest part of all - I'm happy for them, a lot more happy than I am sad that I won't be seeing them anymore. Has New York hardened me to the point that the departure of friends is no longer shocking or saddening? Or is this merely the downside to having "second families" - that just as we left the nest and require airplanes to visit our parents and siblings, we will someday need them for our second families too? Whatever the case, I know that they will be happy in their new homes, as I am happy here, and that with each person who comes in and out of this city and moves on, I get a great place to visit when I miss them.

Who knows, maybe by 2006 I'll actually be ready to join them.

This article was published in the New York Times Magazine in October 2001 and perfectly depicts what I refer to as the "second family".

By ETHAN WATTERS

It may be true that 'never marrieds' are saving themselves for something better. They may also be saving the institution of marriage while they're at it.

You may be like me: between the ages of 25 and 39, single, a college-educated city dweller. If so, you may have also had the unpleasant experience of discovering that you have been identified (by the U.S. Census Bureau, no less) as one of the fastest-growing groups in America -- the ''never marrieds.'' In less than 30 years, the number of never-marrieds has more than doubled, apparently pushing back the median age of marriage to the oldest it has been in our country's history -- about 25 years for women and 27 for men.

As if the connotation of ''never married'' weren't negative enough, the vilification of our group has been swift and shrill. These statistics prove a ''titanic loss of family values,'' according to The Washington Times. An article in Time magazine asked whether ''picky'' women were ''denying themselves and society the benefits of marriage'' and in the process kicking off ''an outbreak of 'Sex and the City' promiscuity.'' In a study on marriage conducted at Rutgers University, researchers say the ''social glue'' of the family is at stake, adding ominously that ''crime rates . . . are highly correlated with a large percentage of unmarried young males.''

Although I never planned it, I can tell you how I became a never-married. Thirteen years ago, I moved to San Francisco for what I assumed was a brief transition period between college and marriage. The problem was, I wasn't just looking for an appropriate spouse. To use the language of the Rutgers researchers, I was ''soul-mate searching.'' Like 94 percent of never-marrieds from 20 to 29, I, too, agree with the statement ''When you marry, you want your spouse to be your soul mate first and foremost.'' This über-romantic view is something new. In a 1965 survey, fully three out of four college women said they'd marry a man they didn't love if he fit their criteria in every other way. I discovered along with my friends that finding that soul mate wasn't easy. Girlfriends came and went, as did jobs and apartments. The constant in my life -- by default, not by plan -- became a loose group of friends. After a few years, that group's membership and routines began to solidify. We met weekly for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. We traveled together, moved one another's furniture, painted one another's apartments, cheered one another on at sporting events and open-mike nights. One day I discovered that the transition period I thought I was living wasn't a transition period at all. Something real and important had grown there. I belonged to an urban tribe.

I use the word ''tribe'' quite literally here: this is a tight group, with unspoken roles and hierarchies, whose members think of each other as ''us'' and the rest of the world as ''them.'' This bond is clearest in times of trouble. After earthquakes (or the recent terrorist strikes), my instinct to huddle with and protect my group is no different from what I'd feel for my family.

Once I identified this in my own life, I began to see tribes everywhere I looked: a house of ex-sorority women in Philadelphia, a team of ultimate-frisbee players in Boston and groups of musicians in Austin, Tex. Cities, I've come to believe, aren't emotional wastelands where fragile individuals with arrested development mope around self-indulgently searching for true love. There are rich landscapes filled with urban tribes.

So what does it mean that we've quietly added the tribe years as a developmental stage to adulthood? Because our friends in the tribe hold us responsible for our actions, I doubt it will mean a wild swing toward promiscuity or crime. Tribal behavior does not prove a loss of ''family values.'' It is a fresh expression of them.

It is true, though, that marriage and the tribe are at odds. As many ex-girlfriends will ruefully tell you, loyalty to the tribe can wreak havoc on romantic relationships. Not surprisingly, marriage usually signals the beginning of the end of tribal membership. From inside the group, marriage can seem like a risky gambit. When members of our tribe choose to get married, the rest of us talk about them with grave concern, as if they've joined a religion that requires them to live in a guarded compound.

But we also know that the urban tribe can't exist forever. Those of us who have entered our mid-30's find ourselves feeling vaguely as if we're living in the latter episodes of ''Seinfeld'' or ''Friends,'' as if the plot lines of our lives have begun to wear thin.

So, although tribe membership may delay marriage, that is where most of us are still heading. And it turns out there may be some good news when we get there. Divorce rates have leveled off. Tim Heaton, a sociologist at Brigham Young University, says he believes he knows why. In a paper to be published next year, he argues that it is because people are getting married later.

Could it be that we who have been biding our time in happy tribes are now actually grown up enough to understand what we need in a mate? What a fantastic twist -- we ''never marrieds'' may end up revitalizing the very institution we've supposedly been undermining.

And there's another dynamic worth considering. Those of us who find it so hard to leave our tribes will not choose marriage blithely, as if it is the inevitable next step in our lives, the way middle-class high-school kids choose college. When we go to the altar, we will be sacrificing something precious. In that sacrifice, we may begin to learn to treat our marriages with the reverence they need to survive.

Ethan Watters is a writer living in San Francisco.