So there’s this cute guy, right? He’s gorgeous, but he’s also an amazing person. So much energy. He swings suddenly from clowning around, to gasping over spiritual insights, to moments of utter humility. Yeah, you're falling for him bad.
So what do you do when you realise there’s someone else out there with that same puckish grin, that same boundless enthusiasm, wicked sense of humour, the same expressions and phrases, and the same thirst for spiritual understanding?
Is it possible to be attracted to someone, without feeling any attraction towards his identical twin?
From the Compuserve love section comes this story; “I have been dating a really nice guy for about two years now. For the past two months, I’ve been fooling around with his identical twin brother. I got pregnant by one of them, but I’m not sure by whom.” Yikes. This is the one situation where a DNA test isn’t going to be of much use!
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“Really they’re one person, split in two.” It’s my mother’s observation, about identical twins. Technically, I suppose she’s right. One egg that splits, one being that becomes two.
What is it that makes us a unique individual? Our personality, right? But where does that come from. Our genes? Our upbringing? Well, you’re not going to find much genetic variation between identical twins, and in many cases, especially in the crucial formative years, there’s not much difference in upbringing. Surely it doesn’t come down to a matter of fingerprints? (Identical twins usually have very similar fingerprints, but subtle differences develop in the microenvironment of the womb).
Twins are seen as a godsend (haha) by scientists who are studying the effects of nature and nurture. Many studies of identical twins who have been raised separately have found that they have similar personalities, share similar ideas, and live similar lives. Perhaps more so than twins brought up together. “James Arthur Springer and James Edward Lewis, had just been reunited at age 39 after being given up by their mother and separately adopted as 1-month-olds. Springer and Lewis, both Ohioans, found they had each married and divorced a woman named Linda and remarried a Betty. They shared interests in mechanical drawing and carpentry; their favourite school subject had been math, their least favourite, spelling. They smoked and drank the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day.” (From the Washington Post). Perhaps, without the presence of another person who looks exactly the same, twins don’t feel the need to differentiate themselves, and so just go with the genetic flow? Or are these sorts of findings just statistical anomalies that we jump on because the people involved are twins? Of course, the conclusion that most scientists are moving towards is that it is not nature or nurture that makes us who we are, but a complex interaction between the two.
Does it have anything to do with spirituality? If you go with the Catholic Church, then we are a whole person from day one of the pregnancy. As the egg can split up until about day 15, this brings us back to the idea that twins are one person, split in two. One soul that splits? Despite all the spooky stories that abound on the net, about wordless communication and genetic magnetism between twins, I don’t think this is the case.
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Ironically it is during the hongi that I begin to feel the deep differences between them. The greeting acknowledges that we all share the same breath, the same universal life force. Yet we all accept that force and use it in different ways.
After we hongi, one of the twins laughs and squeezes my shoulder. The other breathes, “he ataahua,” and pulls away slowly.
I'm left musing on the wonders of life. How many people live on this earth, and yet we each have our own path to walk. Like the complex web of an ecosystem, we breathe as one, yet we all have a different part to play; a unique contribution to the whole.
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Oh, and as for the question of attraction? The similarities are definitely more than skin deep. No, they're not the same, and no, I don't feel the same way about both of them. But… hell, what can I say? They’re both damn cute!
Posted by Fionnaigh at October 15, 2003 09:35 AM