Twin or Lose
During my lunch break today, I was skimming some interesting news on the Internet, when I came across this dandy from the UK:
A pair of twins who were adopted by separate families as babies got married without knowing they were brother and sister, a peer told the House of Lords. A court annulled the British couple’s union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord Alton said.
Yep, that’s right … they met each other later in life, felt an “inevitable attraction”, and ended up getting hitched. Totally weird.
As I was reading the article, a former student of mine, who had the afternoon off from her high school, walked into the room to say hello. I love it when that happens … we chatted about life, catching up on the latest stories and shooting the breeze a bit. Eventually, I brought up the article … and her reaction was strong. She was absolutely disgusted!
Then I realized why … she’s a fraternal twin. And she has a brother.
Whoops. 
January 11th, 2008 at 2:59 pm EST
What do you do with that one. They didn’t know each other or grow up as sister and brother. Biblically, once you marry, you’re married. On the other hand, it’s incest. eeeww!
January 12th, 2008 at 1:05 pm EST
i suppose family reunions will be a little awkward after that…
rather silent, i’d think.
mmm…well there are a lot of tangents i won’t take on this one. kind of hard to talk about isn’t it?
January 12th, 2008 at 9:06 pm EST
Twins. Interesting. Have you ever heard of the Jim twins? I mean..since we are talking interesting twin things.
Well, the Jim twins were separated at only 4 weeks old and were adopted into separate families (both of which named the children Jim) The Jims grew up knowing they had been a twin but with the idea that their twin had died. They were reunited when they were like 39 and they had really odd similarities. For example: They had both named a child James Allan (well one was James Alan). Each had been married twice, the first time to women named Linda and the second to women named Betty. They smoked the same brand of cigarette, drank the same brand of beer. They were exactly 6 feet tall and both weighed exactly 180 lbs. They named their dogs the same names, took family vacations at the same beach, they both built the same bench around trees in their backyard, and they both had been a part time sheriff at some point. ODD. There were more similarities…I just can’t think of them all right now. Twins are cool. I wish I was a twin.
Ok…that’s all.
January 12th, 2008 at 9:33 pm EST
This will probably sound odd, but being adopted myself, it is something that crosses your mind at times. You meet a girl, things are going well, and somewhere at some point a little voice says “oh crap, I really hope we are not related”. It is usually a fleeting subconscious thought but it is there none the less. The chances are of course incredibly slim but as this article reminds it is still possible.
I can only imagine the shock and confusion that this situation must have caused for these folks. In some ways it really challenges the notion of romantic love. If you fall in love with someone and then find out something that utterly turns the situation on its head where does the love go? While many of us were probably and rightly intellectually repulsed by the notion of brother and sister in an intimate relationship how can any of us stand in judgement of two people falling in love? And how can we know that what we believe and hold as absolutes are not just a reflection of how we have been socialized? Please do not mistake these questions as some plea for moral relativism, they are asked in earnest and are my feeble attempt to address the wide grey area that is the human experience.