I was thinking deep thoughts while watching the main event of last night’s WWE Clash of Champions PPV, in which Roman Reigns defended the Universal Championship against his cousin Jey Uso, whose identical twin, Jimmy, also wrestles for WWE.
Do you get people frequently asking, “Which one are you?” Do you feel the need to live up to the higher standards your twin has achieved, or to maintain a higher standard for yourself?
Do you get along with your twin? Do you often share the same thoughts? Do you have anything else to add that I may have forgotten to mention?
My sons are twins, although not identical. They certainly had enough people asking “Which one are you?” when they were young. that I can’t imagine what identicals have to go through.
As far as the other questions, they had both a strong bond and a strong rivalry going from pre-adolescence at least until they lived together after college. I actually think it wasn’t as bad as my sisters, who were born almost exactly a year apart and competed against each other in almost everything.
They didn’t do anything like share the same thoughts or develop their own language. Maybe that’s reserved for full identicals.
My mother is an identical twin, and was for a long time really identical looking. Looking at photographs of them as children, I can’t tell them apart. According to her, her sister was the evil one, since even their parents could not always tell them apart and would do things like manage to get both desserts and get my mom in trouble for getting both desserts. I’m sure there’s some selective memory going on there.
As adults, they are easily differentiated (lifestyle has a big impact on appearance). They are close, but obviously not as close as they were as children.
My grandmother was an identical twin. I was 10 before I could confidentally tell her apart when at family get togethers. I have a pair of identical uncles are mid70s and have never lived more than a mile apart until this past May when one had to move closer to a bigger hospital (200 miles away). They cleaned out each others’ garages and houses (took a month) before the move- laughing and remembering the decades of fishing and hunting together. They did a final fishing trip together and it was known to be their last- as the moving uncle has pancreatic cancer and Parkinson’s. Other uncle is perfectly healthy- which in many ways is more devastating for him to have watched the years of deterioration. Close doesn’t begin to describe them- I think of them as more of a pair than I did of my grandparents. I like one of them more, but the other is more loving and gentle. So there is a lot of personality that differentiates them.
I’m not a twin, but when I was in high school, the teacher walked into the room, addressed a girl, and said, “I saw you smoking out on the sidewalk this morning.” She replied, “That couldn’t have been me; I don’t smoke. That may have been my twin sister…” and when the teacher started to say, "And since when have you - " those of us who knew them said, “No, she really does!” The teacher replied, “No wonder I’ve seen you so often around the school.”
These girls were not identical, but they were about the same height and weight and had similar hairstyles, so they would have looked very much alike from a distance.
I’ve known multiple pairs of identical twins, and never had any difficulty telling them apart (the pair I knew most closely, it helped a lot that they deliberately wore different hairstyles). But I once had a couple of campers who were sisters two years apart, that I couldn’t tell one from the other even when they were standing right next to each other.
