Buddy System

They were a tight-knit group, these friends from Sands Point, N.Y. They had moved to the exclusive Long Island community in the late 1940s and early '50s. The husbands commuted to Manhattan; the wives raised the children, did volunteer work, played golf and tennis, and met every Friday for lunch at the Manhasset Yacht Club. They spent 40 New Year's Eves together. And then, about two years ago, when most were in their 80s, they all sold their houses and retired.

So, was that it? The end of the lunches, the shared holidays, the bonds of friendship? Not at all. The friends retired together. Within months of one another, they moved 16 strong to the Windrows in Princeton, N.J., an assisted-living community. There, as before, they regularly lunch and play tennis. The going is getting a little tougher. Two members have been widowed; one has Alzheimer's; two suffer from macular degeneration. Those who can't drive must depend on the others. Still, single or married, ill or well, everyone is included.

The "Long Island contingent," as some call them in Princeton, are harbingers of a ground swell in retirement strategies. "I'm turning 60," says University of Chicago psychologist Froma Walsh, "and I'm hearing it everywhere." What she's hearing are schemes, sometimes in the fantasy stage, sometimes more fully developed, for friends to stick together even after leaving their jobs and homes. No numbers exist on this trend; demographers can't track retirement castles in the air. But talk to people over 50, and almost all of them have heard it from a friend--if they're not sketching it out for themselves.

Some groups cherish the notion of buying a plot of land and building separate houses on it or buying and splitting up an apartment building. "I've talked about buying a grand old house to share with my husband and four other couples, along with one younger person to do the harder physical work," says Pauline Boss, 67, a family therapist at the University of Minnesota.

What is it about the current wave of retirees that makes them put this new premium on togetherness? These folks lived through the '60s together, bonded over political activism and experienced a sense of community. As they age, they want to be with peers who share their cultural references and values. Also, as jobs and marriages have wrenched them far from their hometowns and as the nuclear family has broken down, they have felt the loss of their original communities.

In putting friends first, the new-style retirees are also putting their own emotional needs front and center in their blueprints for later life. Some are learning from the mistakes of those who went before, who followed the siren lure of climate and amenities into a lonely paradise. In a mid-1990s study of 1,500 retirees from a FORTUNE 500 company who settled in the southeastern U.S., the participants answered overwhelmingly that they had not planned well enough for their emotional needs or how they would spend their time, reports gerontologist Marlene M. Rosenkoetter, dean of the school of nursing at the Medical College of Georgia.