Popular culture most often portrays twins as having deep and loving relationships with one another. Secondarily, twinship is used to illustrate good and evil or opposite images. Only recently have novels and memoirs been written that explain the pain and animosity that twins can share and are forced to tolerate in each other.

Twinship is fraught with many identity struggles that can play out in enragement and disbelief at one’s twin. Shame about “who your twin has become” or “who your twin wants you to be” is very common. Twin estrangement is often an outcome of deeply conflicted twin relationships. Estrangement based on a lack of adequate parenting creates despair and loneliness for twins. The depth of despair that comes from twin estrangement is hard for close friends and family to understand, unless they happen to be twins also. Twins who do get along have great difficulty understanding the depth of this estrangement.

I am a twin, so I can tell you from experience that being estranged from your twin is very hard, painful and lonely. I would say that estrangement from your twin can create a sense of serious loss and unhappiness. I have found that when twins talk with other twins about the loneliness that is based upon estrangement, relief from this anguish is diminished and less frightening. Talking with other twins who have ruptured or are ready to rupture their relationships often helps to heal despair. In some instances, twins will reconcile. In other cases, twins learn to accept their differences and move on.