Parents of identical twins, we salute you. Twice the nappies and feeding times combined with half the sleep makes you a legend.
But twins, we’ve also got to acknowledge that it seems many of your parents took advantage of their situation to conduct bizarre social experiments on you and your sibling...
Now parents and children on Reddit have given us a snapshot into their lives.
1. The One Where You Decided Who’s Older
“I’m an identical twin, and my brother is fifteen minutes older than me. When we were 20, our mum told us that we were part of an experiment where we were told the wrong birth order. At first neither of us believed her, but she showed us a document detailing the experiment. I laughed at it, but I didn’t really care. Being the younger twin does not really matter to me. My brother, on the other hand, got angry. During our lives he has been the one to take the lead on things. This experiment completely undermined his role in our relationship.”
2. The One With The Toys
“I’m a woman who has a twin brother, my parents did various gender studies, so to speak. Stuff like if your boy and girl twins share a room, and that room is stocked with dolls and guns, who’s going to go for what? (Answer: neither of us went for the dolls, but bro went for the toy weapons and I just obsessed over the Legos.)”
3. The One With The Same Name
“From my experience they are all running the experiment. How much harder can I make it to keep the two straight by naming them ‘Braden’ and ‘Brandon’ instead of just giving them two distinct names like a rational fucking adult.”
4. The One Without Twins
“One of the things we did as parents actually worked. We tried not to raise them as twins. We said they were sisters who had the same birthday. We didn’t let other family members call them ‘the twins’. We insisted on individual names. We did not dress them alike. They were in different classrooms whenever the school had two classes for the same year. So, last year they told us that they did not realize they were twins until sometime around third year.”
5. The One Where They Got Their Own Back
“I do know that sets of twins in my school would experiment on their parents why switching their clothes before going home and seeing if the parents noticed. They did this frequently at school as well and switched classes. No one noticed at school, and the parents took until late in the night to realize they had switched.”
6. The One That Every Parent Is Currently Testing
“I have brand new twin boys that, while not truly identical, are still pretty similar - ie: they both look like potatoes. Current experiments in progress are:
- Determine the probability of being able to go to work in the morning without baby puke on my shirt.
Determine the minimum amount of sleep a software engineer can survive on.
Determine how long I can go without sex before climbing the fucking walls out of frustration.
I swear, these two are trying to kill me.”
- Efpophis
