Strange But True: Being A Twin Has Kept Me Single

My mother, a psychologist, often wondered if twins have a harder time finding life partners because, essentially, they already have one.

Why am I single? Well, no man can compare to my relationship with my brother. Wait, come back!

Here’s the thing: I’m a twin. When I tell people that, their eyes light up like it’s Christmas. “Really?” they say, and then they have a million other questions: What’s he like, are you identical (a question opposite sex fraternal twins get way more often than you’d expect), where does he live, are you close? They’ll pinch me and want to know if he can feel it; they ask if we can read each other’s minds. But what I think people are really interested in, and what they can’t quite put into words when they ask all those questions, is: What is it actually like? Having, basically, another version of yourself?

This is hard to answer, because I don’t have anything to compare it to. I don’t know life alone. I don’t know existence alone. I became alive at the same time as someone else, I became a person with someone else. When I was born, I formed an attachment to my mother, of course, and my father, yes, but the attachment to my brother was real before anything else.

It’s may be no surprise, then, that I am still single.

My mother, a psychologist, often wondered if twins have a harder time finding life partners because, essentially, they already have one. I didn’t think about this question much while I was growing up. But now that I’m nearing my mid-thirties (gasp) and am still single (gasp!), I’ve been giving it more thought. And it turns out, there is truth to this. A lot, actually. This passage from Twin and Triplet Psychology really struck me:

“Twins, who for many years have lived with someone who understood their moods and feelings and who may have intuitively known what they were thinking or what they would like to do, may feel disappointed and cheated if their new partner fails to live up to such standards.”

This got me curious. So I reached out to my cousin, who is also a twin (yes, twins do seem to run in families, at least in ours) and also single, and asked if she ever…