In the late 1970’s I shopped for groceries at one of the last small, family owned groceries in my city.
I noticed that the manager seemed to move around awfully fast. He’d be working with bills in the office up front, then five minutes later I’d see him cutting meat, with spots of blood on his apron.
Turns out “he” was a pair of identical twin brothers. Even approaching senior status few if anyone could tell them apart.
One older female clerk seemed to move around rather quickly as well, and you can guess it, “she” was an identical twin pair.
To really put the icing on the cake, the two sets of twins were married to each other, the two brothers to the two sisters. They lived together in a big duplex house they built, with private rooms but a common cooking area. Talk about togetherness. Once they were invited to Japan to appear on a television show about twins.
The music director at my church is father to a set of identical twin daughters. I can’t tell those young women apart for anything, they are so alike.
I’ve known several pairs, all of which can be told apart after careful (or not so careful) study. Many people seem to have more problems remembering which name corresponds to which twin than actually telling them apart.
Story told before, of two twins who met when they were seventeen. I still think the judge who split them should have been hung with the guts of the boys’ father.
Take into account that we normally decide twins are “identical” if they are, well, twins, and look very similar; apparently some of them are actually fraternal but just happen to look very similar. My father and one of his brothers were born four years apart, but people can’t tell them apart in individual childhood pictures and they often got mistaken for each other as adults; two of my classmates were Irish twins but people thought they were identical.
I’ve met a few sets of identicals. There were identical twin boys in my camp that I never quite managed to tell apart, but I didn’t spend much time with them. A friend has identical twin girls. One is gregarious and outgoing. The other is shy and cautious. They look very similar, except for their facial expressions and behavior. I work with two guys who don’t know if they are identical twins. They are twins, and they look very similar, but their delivery was dicey and no one paid attention to whether they shared a placenta, because the doctors were too busy keeping everyone alive. They are pretty similar.
I went to high school with two of three identical triplets. They were tall and smart and athletic. One was sort of a jock, and the other was more academically oriented, but both were good at both, they just seemed to have picked different areas. But their triplet went to a different school. He was the “runt” of the litter, and he was of average height, average intelligence, wore thick glasses, and was clumsy. He was fine, but clearly lost the lottery compared to his triplets. Prenatal “nurture” matters a lot.
My friend’s daughters were premature, and the shy, cautious one was much more underweight than her twin. I wonder if that explains their different personalities.
I once knew a pair of identical twins. One of them had a pretty bad stutter, which gave her severe stage fright - she hated to present in class or talk to large groups of people. She and her sister would wear different color headbands. On the day of a presentation, they’d both go to the bathroom at the same time and switch their headbands; the sister without the stutter would pretend to be her twin and give the presentation.
I met the stuttering twin in a teenage stuttering support group (I have a stutter as well). It’s funny, because at the time we were all a bit jealous of her - it seemed like a luxury, since speaking aloud was such a source of anxiety for us all. Looking back, though, I’ve always wondered how she’s doing. In a way, it’s better to have to face your fears rather than depend on your twin in that way.
Things like nutrition and physical activity can affect development, though. Two people can be genetically identical, but have height or weight differences depending on environmental factors at times in their life like puberty.
I’ve known two pairs. One was when I was in college: They deliberately wore different hairstyles (one cut short, the other long) to make themselves look different, but they were identical other than that (including some very distinctive features: I think I’d probably still recognize them). They had radically different personalities.
The other pair was while I was a camp counselor, and I think they were still in the “let’s confuse everyone for fun” phase: They never dressed exactly alike, but they’d do things like wear the same styles just in different colors. I noticed on the first or second day that one of them had a distinguishing feature (a scar, I think it was), and told them apart that way. Or more precisely, I’d note at the beginning of the day which one was which, and then tell them apart for the rest of the day by the color of their clothes. Since I only saw them for a week, I can’t say just how similar their personalities were.
I knew two sets of twins in college. One was fraternal, a brother and a sister. They were no more or less alike than any two siblings close in age. We were at one of those ages that make people nod knowingly and claim that girls mature faster than boys, plus the brother had just recently come out and was still in that phase where he was telling people he was gay sometimes before he remembered to tell them his name, so the sister was the bearer of most of the practical sense the two of them had between them.
The other set I thought were fraternal twins until one of them told me they were identical. One grew her hair long; the other cut it short. One dyed it; one didn’t. One wore her glasses; the other wore contacts. They didn’t have matched personalities, either. I spent much more time with long hair-contacts, and she was up in the Woody Allen bracket of neuroticism. Short hair-glasses was, at least on the surface, much more laid back. I have no idea which one was older, or by how many minutes – they didn’t seem to care, or at least didn’t talk about it with outsiders much.
These days, I’m acquainted with a pair of identical twins who perform as burlesque dancers and circus acrobats, stage names Jack Silver and Danny Drake in a troupe called Sirlesque. (Google it yourself. They all like posting photos of themselves in their underwear.) It’s difficult sometimes to tell them apart at stage distance if they’re doing a choreographed group number, particularly if they’ve got hats covering their different haircuts, but otherwise they move completely differently. They don’t even have the same facial expressions, really. They do have a lot of things in common – they had similar majors in college, they’re both very quiet, they both like expensive vehicles that go VROOM a lot – but other than that, the main thing that sets them apart from pairs like the first fraternal set I mentioned is that each one knows how the other one thinks to such an extent that, when they do disagree, it’s often over what sounds to outsiders like tiny trivialities. It’s as if they both mentally trace their way through the conversation to the point where they know they’ll disagree, and only then bother speaking aloud.
I was assuming we were talking about people who shared a genome – one fertilized egg that twinned (or tripletted) – as distinct from fraternal twins who come from two eggs and just happened to be gestated at the same time.
And my answer was, “yes, I have known such people, and in this case, they were radically different, despite sharing a genome.”
My daughter has a friend whose dad is an identical twin, and he recently married a woman who is also an identical twin. The woman he married told me that, among other things, she was drawn to him because he would “get” twinhood.
I work with a pair of identical twins. As many have already said, when I first started, I didn’t know there were twins in the department and I would think, “wait, I just saw you…” Now I can’t believe that anyone would mistake them for one another.
My son is friends with 2 sets of twins. One set I can tell apart no problem. The other set? Well, I just call them both “buddy.”
Not so far as I know, actually. I don’t know much about their hobbies, but I’ve spent enough time around them and the other guys that I think someone would have mentioned if if they were huge home theater or video game nuts. I do know they both play amateur team sports – they share at least one sport, although I am not 100% sure they play for the same team – and one of them plays Magic: The Gathering, or some sort of similar CCG. I mainly see them in the context of performing, which means they’re both laser-focused on the show the whole time.
They take the VROOM pretty seriously, though. Both of them drive sports cars, and the one bike I’ve seen was a Ducati.