My birthday in 2016 was a bit bleak. The paper I was working for had announced a tranche of redundancies and as a result I had to cancel a skiing holiday with my identical twin and our friends, so I could stay at home and fight for my job. At 8am, while Lydia was whizzing down pristine white slopes in Val d’Isère, I was sitting in front of my editor, an expanse of pristine white desk between us, trying to convince him to keep me on. It was the first birthday my twin and I had spent apart. Through 25 years of twinhood – even when studying at opposite ends of the country – we had always blown out our candles together.
I can’t remember whose idea it was for my sister’s new boyfriend to take me out that evening, but I’m pretty sure it was his. They’d only been seeing each other for a couple of months and I’d met him just once, briefly, at a local pub. But that night, my birthday night, we went to a restaurant in Soho in London and he bought me dinner and drinks. We talked about my job interview; our experiences of living in London; his love of football; my feelings about the gender pay gap; and, of course, our shared interest – my sister. I got home at 1am. I was tipsy, happy and convinced Lydia should marry him. Five years later, she did.
We joke about it now. That their most successful date was one Lydia wasn’t on has become family folklore. Who else, we giggle, could take his new girlfriend’s sister for dinner while said new girlfriend was out of the country and emerge smelling of roses? But that birthday has stayed with me because, I think, it encapsulates what it’s like being in a relationship with a twin. It wasn’t just an act of kindness, it also displayed a profound awareness of what makes twins tick: each other. Sure, maybe he was playing the long game. Perhaps he just wanted to get me onside early (it worked). But, actually, I think my brother-in-law knew in making sure I was OK that night, he also ensured his girlfriend – far away and missing her sister – was OK, too.
I recently recounted this story to twins Lisa and Alana Macfarlane (aka the Mac Twins) for their new podcast Shit! I Married a Twin! in which the twins and one of their partners (Lisa’s husband doesn’t take part as, according to the duo, he is “grumpy, private, too busy, and an adult”) unpick what it’s really like for the other halves. Inspired, I decided to ask my partner, brother-in-law and sister for their thoughts, so that I could focus the microscope on our unique relationship.
Seven years after that birthday dinner, I’m in a civil partnership and my sister is married. We met our partners – one an accountant, one a maths teacher, same but different – in the same year and currently live in the same city. I was surprised to learn that both my partner and brother-in-law were mystified by twins before meeting us. “I’d never known any,” my partner confessed. “To me, they were a bit like mythical creatures.” My brother-in-law agreed, adding: “I would probably have said they were slightly weird.” And perhaps we are, if not mythical, then certainly weird. Lydia and I, though identical, aren’t psychic – that bit is a myth – but I do know, instantly, how she is feeling. No, I can’t tell what colour, shape or animal she is thinking of at a single moment (oddly, that’s how people always test our psychic abilities), but I do know if she is happy, sad, pensive, anxious or angry. I can tell what she will find funny and what will infuriate her. We also have the same voice, laugh and mannerisms.
Of course, we have our differences (she’s organised, I’m creative; she favours a capsule wardrobe while I dress as if from a dressing-up box), but we are, essentially, built from the same blocks. Perhaps this is why I can read her – not like a book, that implies an amount of time and effort – like a clock face: intuitively and at a single glance.
It must be challenging, then, to be on the periphery of this, as our partners are. Challenging, too, for them to know that – often as a result of this communication shorthand – there is no such thing as a secret between twins. In the early days, my partner admits, he did worry about me sharing details of our relationship with Lydia. “I was a much more private person when I met you,” he explains. “I think being in a relationship with a twin has encouraged me to be more open. I don’t think you dragged me there kicking and screaming – I think it was a more gradual process of realisation, of ‘OK, this is how this sort of relationship works.’” My brother-in-law agrees. “I’ve been caught out a couple of times where I’ve either assumed or asked for information to remain private and I’ve realised that very little isn’t shared between twins. I’ve had to adapt.”
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More telling, perhaps, is that although my partner thinks of me as his other half, he doesn’t think of himself as mine. That, he says, is Lydia. “I’m a smaller, extra fraction,” he says, ever the maths teacher. Personally, I’ve always been reticent about using this phrase to refer to a partner. I imagine that’s because, all my life, I’ve been made whole by a different half: my sister. This is the tricky lot of a twin’s partner: always being the smaller, extra fraction. At Lydia’s hen party, during a game of Mr and Mrs, she was asked who she would save from a burning building: me, her soon-to-be husband, or their dog. Needless to say, I escaped the flames and my brother-in-law guessed his fiancée’s answer correctly. Lydia, typically sensible, isn’t a fan of the phrase itself. “Other half,” she says, nose wrinkled in disgust. “It’s diminishing.”
We all agree, though, that one of the hardest parts of being a four is managing big, transformative changes. Lives, even the lives of twins, don’t always sync up. Lydia and I lived together for two years in our early 20s until she moved in with her future husband. Not ready to make a similar move myself, I found it hard. I tried not to resent her partner but it was difficult not to feel, in stealing away my most precious person, he was the cause of my unhappiness. I feel terrible about it now, but that period – we called it Lexit – felt, to me, akin to a divorce. We divided our crockery and soft furnishings, she handed over responsibility for the household bills, and I got a lodger to fill her room. I wallowed in self-pity while Lydia was torn between, rightly, celebrating the move, managing my despondency and grieving the end of an era herself. “I was sad thinking that we’d not live together again,” she says now.
Perhaps our biggest trial was when, in 2021, I had a baby days after my sister had a miscarriage. On top of her grief, Lydia found herself feeling envious not so much of my time with my partner, but with my son, a brand new contender for my other half. My sister and her partner’s ongoing fertility journey – alongside mine and my partner’s lurch into parenthood – has proved our most agonising challenge yet. “When you first had Fabian, I felt like the three of you were a family that I wasn’t in any more,” she says. “That made me sad.”
She doesn’t feel left out any more, she explains, in large part because of her fondness for my partner, who she describes as a “bonus best friend”. He’s equally complimentary about her. With ex-girlfriends, he explains, family members existed but remained on the fringes. Meanwhile, his relationship with Lydia, he says, is “the best bits of a best friend and the best bits of a sister”. And of my bond with her husband, Lydia says: “You don’t just get on, you really get each other. It brings me so much joy when you connect over something that’s not related to me.”
It’s true, there is real delight in observing two people you love love each other; in seeing them treat each other with kindness and respect; in watching, for example, the concern creep over my partner’s face as I tell him about a difficult day Lydia has had. I don’t think my partner has ever said a bad word about my sister – and, says Lydia, my brother-in-law is just as generous towards me. (“I think a fight between you and me would be one of the worst things Lydia could imagine,” he later tells me.) None of this is to say they don’t find us both at times intensely irritating, infuriating, or inappropriate. I’m sure they do. But it’s as if the twin relationship, above all, is sacrosanct.
It makes us a tight unit; tighter, perhaps, than when Lydia and I were just a twosome. Lydia says it best: “We’ve always had each other’s backs and now we have reinforcements. It feels like the closest family I have. I love that.”
