“So what’s it like having a twin?”

That has to be the question I’ve been asked more times than any other in my lifetime (with the exception of generic ones like ‘what’s your name’ and ‘where are you going’, and, of course, ‘YOU HAVE A TWIN????’). You’d think I would have had a standard answer prepared by now, what with the tons of practice I’ve had, but no, I don’t. Still stumps me every time.

I guess what confounds me is what exactly people want to know. Stupid questions like

“Do you have twin telepathy?”

or

“is it like looking into a mirror?”

Those I can handle. But how do I sum up a key facet of my existence in a single reply? I can’t, but in the space of a few hundred words, I can give it a try.

My twin and I are fraternal. This makes all exclamations of

“Oh! You two look exactly alike!”

Erroneous at best, because I have as much chance of looking exactly like him as I have with my other two brothers (who are, by the way, not twins). I can’t deny a more-than-ordinary degree of likeness, but in my case at least, what I can do is offer an empirical basis to the fact of our physical difference: we were two eggs from the start. I have never looked at my twin and thought,

‘Hey, that guy’s wearing my face’.  

For my twin and I, the fact that we look somewhat alike has never been an impediment, advantage or even anything out of the ordinary. It just was. And we wondered why people kept making such a big deal out of it.

People also think it’s real cute when they discover we’ve been in the same school from kindergarten all the way to university. Don’t ask me why. Proof of the preternaturally strong bond between twins like we’re a molecule of O2 or something. When we were kids, we did use to create a kind of bubble around ourselves that outsiders found hard to penetrate. And I admit that even today, there are in-jokes, references and turns of speech that only my twin understands and can partake in. These are the undeniable perks of having a twin, of being able to construct a self-sufficient social space in which communication is as near an ideal state as humans can achieve.

But therein lies the problem. Enter that exclusive twin realm often enough, and sooner or later people are going to start thinking of you as a single entity. Which sucks. My twin and I had it worse than most, because we were good at roughly the same kinds of things and had roughly the same kinds of interests. Nobody was really going to split hairs about what kind of book each of us preferred reading once they’d established that we were both bookworms. And so it was always ‘the twins’ this and ‘the twins’ that, and even if we were partially to blame for being conceived of as such, that didn’t make it any less aggravating. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were the inevitable comparisons. We were lucky that our parents rarely resorted to making crude judgments about our respective capabilities, but I sometimes wonder if my pathological aversion to competition isn’t somehow related to the comparisons nearly everyone else did make. That’s the paradox of being a twin: you are simultaneously conflated into a single organism and set side by side in constant juxtaposition.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Having a twin means one usually has somebody to share the blame when something goes wrong, and I was never without a partner for all those co-op or two-player video games. I have a ready-made sounding block whenever I need a second opinion on a particular essay paragraph or story idea, and I can annoy him (to a point) with all my various idiosyncrasies without fear of being labelled a mental case. I wouldn’t trade my twin for anything in the world (stop going ‘awwww’, all of you simpering fools), but what I’m trying to say is having a twin’s a mixed bag. I never could understand why some people tell me they wish they had a twin just like I do. To me, it’s nothing special. I’ve had one all my life and will continue having one until the day either one of us croaks.

So what’s it like having a twin? I don’t know, what would you like me to tell you? One thing’s for sure, though. It definitely doesn’t feel special. Or strange. It’s a fact of life, with all the joy and grief that any such fact entails.