How many people in a couple can say they welcome difference?
It was always assumed, since we were indistinguishable, that our glue was a kind of narcissism, yet nothing was further from the truth. Take it from me: similarity is not intimacy.
Those few who knew us well —and there weren't many— could only tell us apart by the scar…mine on my left, his on his right…must have happened when the zygote split. Anyway, our scars were meaningless to us, since looking at the other was no different than looking in a mirror.
Everywhere we went we were ridiculed as a loathsome twosome. You can imagine the names: "Dupe & Dub," "Ibid & Ibad," and as a unit, "The Tush." We had miserable childhoods. Speaking for myself, I was enormously overweight, and his massive company only doubled my self-consciousness. I'll admit one person in horizontal stripes is bad enough. It took everything we had to tolerate what we saw in the other. We only stuck it out together because we were equally scorned, the loneliness was killer.
It got better after we went through puberty.
As I said, people tend to project and think the mirroring was our yoke, that we found comfort in it. But here was our secret: our differences became erotic in their subtlety. For some couples, a difference might seem like a trip on the wild side, a threat, a mystery better ignored. For us, nothing in the other could have been more of a welcome, and we hungered to examine each minute dissimilarity as though we were nearsighted zoologists on the brink of discovering an entirely new creature. And that, come to think of it, was exactly what we were about the business of doing.
