Free One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin Page B

That’s at least one reading of what early childhood development entails. It’s a powerful experience that, in some ways, twins, because of the nature of their closeness, aspire to and sometimes feel:
We understand each other better than anyone else does. We are closer than other brothers and sisters are
. It’s a kind of magical intimacy. And it’s what we all look for in partners.” In his book, he writes about the common “wish to return to a symbiotic relationship—that is, a relationship characterized by a lack of self-other differentiation in which one’s needs are magically understood and met.”
    Twins researcher Nancy Segal, a fraternal twin who has studied twins for three decades, affirms the mythos of twins: “For singletons especially,” she tells me, “I think you look into that world, and especially for people who are missing something vital in their relationship—you see a certain closeness and camaraderie. And you’re envious of it. Some people might be put off by it because they see it as a claustrophobic closeness, almost too much, a lack of independence.But I think that’s basically what we all crave: We all want to have somebody who knows us as well as our identical twin
would
have if we’d had an identical twin.”
    Twins in love. It actually flashed through my mind more than once during my interviews—with the Barbers, the Ganzes, and with others:
These two have a romance
. Not in a queasy, freaky way, but in the sense of uncomplicated devotion and delight in each other. They weren’t careful. They flaunted their identicalness like a trophy. They prioritized each other without reserve.
    Liza and Jamie Persky, friends of my oldest friend, Jane, live in different states—when we meet, Jamie runs a bakery with her husband in Stowe, Vermont, and Liza is single and a television producer in Manhattan—but they are in touch in a way that makes the miles irrelevant. We talk in one of Manhattan’s ubiquitous Pain Quotidien cafés one summer afternoon.
    â€œWe’ve never had a fight,” Liza confesses sheepishly. “We’ve never screamed at each other.”
    Jamie says the only thing that maddens her about Liza is her lack of confidence. “It annoys me when she doubts herself. That gets so frustrating for me. Because for me to be happy, she needs to be happy. If I feel that she’s in a bad place, it’s hard for me to be in a good place. It never feels better to be doing better than she.”
    The only thing they don’t tell each other is when they’ve been complimented.
    â€œLike if someone says I’m pretty,” Jamie says.
    â€œShe
is
prettier,” Liza insists. (I stay neutral.)
    Dr. Ainslie describes how twins recoil when people point out disparities: “There seems to be a feeling that the recognition of differences is experienced as a loss to oneself when one’s twin is being acknowledged,” he writes. “This sense of unequally distributed characteristics only exacerbates the feeling that one has lost something important. Recognition or demarcation of certain abilities or talents feels like a taking away.”
    â€œIf someone compliments me in a way that will make her feel worse, I won’t tell her,” Jamie says.
    Similarly, when seventy-three-year-old Larry Gordon, a childhood friend of my mother-in-law, tells me that he and his identical twin, Gerry, both applied to University of Michigan, he won’t tell me which one didn’t get in. “What you’re asking is who didn’t make it,” he says without smiling, “and I don’t want to answer that.”
    The Persky girls are often holding hands in childhood photographs. They shared one room, one best friend—”It was always awkward because this friend knew she could never be closer than we were to each other”—and they didn’t reach out to other people.