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'Vanishing Twins' Follows One Woman's Search For Individuality Amid Coupledom

When Leah Dieterich settles down with her other half, she begins to wonder: "Once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?"
Source: NPR

When Leah Dieterich accidentally stumbles upon the phenomenon of vanishing twin syndrome, she believes she might have hit on an explanation she's been looking for her entire life.

"I've always preferred being in the company of one other person to being in a group," she writes in her memoir, Vanishing Twins. "I'd thought this meant I was antisocial, but maybe it's a desire to return to the relationship I had with another person in the womb."

She calls the closeness she, "a perpetual state of becoming more alike." She finds it in her adolescence with her best friend, Giselle, who abruptly splits off from their coupledom when she discovers boys, causing Dieterich to lose the "comforting symmetry that had always made our friendship seem predestined."

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