Pull the other one...

Consider this scenario:

You're in this bar, a good bar with decent music, not too much smoke, comfy chairs, maybe some funky art on the walls, maybe not. You're drinking a bottle of beer - Corona with a slice of lime pushed in. It's cold beer which feels good because it's a warm evening. You're not sweating but you would be if you got up and had a dance. That's unlikely though since there's nowhere to dance in this bar.

You see a girl over the other side of the bar. Somehow, through the machinations of your friends you end up chatting to her and things go well. You get on great and it feels like you've known her for ages. Her name's something not too unusual like Sarah or Catherine or Buffy. Not one of those daft new-age names like Apple or Headstone or Funkmonster - that would have put you off and the conversation would never have got started.

Later on, you leave the bar, and you and her head off somewhere else.

You go on a couple of dates with this girl. On one of them, you find out that she's actually one half of a pair of identical twins. At first this feels a little odd, but after a while you get used to it and stop jokingly asking for threesomes. You get to know the other twin and she too becomes a close friend.

After a couple of months you realise that you're in love with Sarah or Catherine or Buffy. You propose and she accepts. You're married six months later in early Spring in a small church near Chichester. It's a lovely wedding, but then you would think that because you're in love.

The first few months of marriage are wonderful. You still see a lot of the other twin - she lives nearby and often comes around for dinner. On one of these occasions a horrible realisation dawns. You actually prefer the other twin. You're not sure why - it's nothing concrete, but she just has something, maybe a spark in her smile or a subtlety in her laugh. Maybe she's slightly more confident, or maybe she's quieter. But there's something that starts to attract you to her. And over the months you come to a horrible truth:

You should have married the other twin.

That'd be a right crappy thing, I expect.

So the moral here is: If you start to date an identical twin, get to know the sister too and ensure that you choose the right one. Of course, if one of them can't stand you, you should take the one that likes/tolerates you and just be grateful you have someone.

I don't know any identical twins, or at least I don't know anybody who's told me that they have an identical twin. I was thinking about why this might be, and I think I've worked it out. They have all been sequestered by the government for use in experiments testing Einstein's theory of relativity.

Because there's the so called "Twin Paradox" where you get a pair of identical twins and put one in a spaceship and leave one at home. You send the one in a spaceship out at something close to the speed of light for a 20 years or so, and then bring them home again. When they are reunited, the one who stayed at home is much older. The reason for this relates to time passing slower in a spaceship (possibly because of the antimatter drives?) and is not really a paradox at all. It still gets called one though.

I think that all the identical twins have been captured and separated. There are hundreds possibly thousands of twin-halves being sent out in little spaceships in all different directions, whilst the other twins are being kept in a holding facility somewhere (probably in New Mexico - they usually seem to be around there). This has been going on for years. None of the space twins have returned yet.

Personally I think it's not right to do this kind of research on real live human girl-twins, mainly because it prevents me being able to have threesomes with them. But I understand why the government feels the need to do these experiments so I will have to sacrifice my own happiness for the greater good.

I guess the good thing that comes out of this is that when in some years time all the identical twins are released back into society there won't be the issue with you potentially choosing the wrong one to marry. Because in each pair there'll be a horrid old manky one, and a young foxy one who also happens to have been into space, which is obviously way cool.

So it all works out in the end.