Katherine and her twin: “We may be two peas in a pod, but we’re not one and the same”Alex Teuscher

As an identical twin, I’ve been asked whether my sister and I have the same name. I’ve overheard a guy insinuate to his friend that if you date one of us you get to sleep with both of us. Over the years, I’ve learned to take these kinds of things in my stride. Yet twin jokes still grate me. As much as I might chuckle along to save your pride, I don’t find these jokes remotely funny; they undermine years of my twin sister and I trying to get the world to view us as individuals, rather than a pair.

Being an identical twin comes with its own difficulties and frustrations, but these are especially challenging when they arrive alongside that painful adolescent process of forging your own identity. It’s difficult to find out who you are when the world keeps telling you that you’re exactly the same as someone else – someone who doesn’t really know who they are either. Since we were very young we’ve been engaged in a constant struggle to push the other away, to establish our own spaces, while at the same time finding ourselves unable to live without the other. So many times growing up I wished I could go to one slumber party that she wasn’t invited to, or receive a mark on a test that wouldn’t immediately be compared to hers.

"Since we were very young we’ve been engaged in a constant struggle to push the other away, to establish our own spaces, while at the same time finding ourselves unable to live without the other"

Growing up, much to our parents’ desperation, we fought all the time. My mum tells the story of how she once she took us to a playdate at a classmate’s house, whose mother gasped and asked: “Why are they covered in bite marks?” “Oh,” Mum casually responded. “They bite each other when they fight.” Looking back, I think this constant fighting was us trying to say ‘I’m different from you, I’m separate from you, I can live without you.’ As we grew older and entered young adulthood, different and subtler challenges have emerged. For example, I think we have higher standards for our romantic partners because we already know what it’s like to be completely emotionally intimate with another person (and, in fact, researchers have found that there is a lower marriage rate among twins, and those who do marry tend to do so later in life).

Having said all that, being a twin is definitely the best thing that has ever happened to me. It’s extremely difficult to describe the connection that we have. My sister understands me better than anyone else in the world. Our conversations are mostly composed of half-sentences because we already know what the other is going to say. Not only do we have the same DNA, but together we have struggled through puberty, moved half-way across the world twice, and survived our parents’ divorce. I cannot imagine life without her – which can be both a blessing and a curse. When we decided to go to different schools for sixth form and I had to walk into school alone for the first time, I realised how much I relied on her presence for my confidence. In the words of Cara Parravani: “People want someone just like them, who thinks like they think and who will understand them even when they don’t understand themselves. People think having a twin means never being lonely. Nothing is lonelier than being separated.”

But we cannot escape the fact that despite 20 years of struggling to establish ourselves as individuals, we are extremely alike. When we both got offers from Cambridge, we decided that we would set out to do things alone: we would try not to see each other too often, we wouldn’t join clubs and societies together, and we would keep our social circles as separate as possible.  Yet, a year and a half on, we are involved in many of same extracurricular activities, we see each other at least every other day, and she is dating someone in my college friendship group. After countless years of telling myself that I’m different to her, it is difficult to admit that we are very similar people.

Yet there is an important distinction to be drawn between the ways in which we are actually alike and the ways in which other people think we are alike. We are alike in deep, unchanging ways that matter to us. Twin jokes imply that we are alike in the ways that we have spent our whole lives trying to show people we are different in: our achievements, our friendships, our dreams and our aspirations for life. Rather than acknowledging us as individuals who have a strong and unique bond, people who tell twin jokes homogenise us. In a way I understand this tendency – better to joke that we’re the same person to cover your back when you get us mixed up. Yet as my sister put it when I told her I was writing this article, “We may be two peas in a pod, but we’re not one and the same”