Abby and Brittany Hensel, a set of conjoined twins, have opened up about how they make intimacy work given their situation.
Abby and Brittany, 34, from Minnesota, are one of only a handful of sets of dicephalous twins in history, meaning they have two heads and two hearts but share a single body from the waist down - including their genitals.
Brittany, AKA the left twin, can't feel anything on the right side of the body, and her sister Abigail, the right twin, can't feel anything on her left but their limbs seemingly move as if coordinated by one person.
While the twins, who originally shot to fame on a reality TV series, have had to navigate how to do many normal daily activities together, things became trickier when Abby decided to tie the knot with her husband back in 2021 in a private ceremony.
Many people wondered how the pair managed to handle everything that comes with marriage including intimacy.
Conjoined twins Lupita and Carmen Andrade, 23, born in Mexico but living in Connecticut, US, have the same physical makeup as Abby and Brittany, but while Carmen has a boyfriend named Daniel, Lupita is actually asexual, meaning she is not sexually attracted to others.
However, Carmen revealed in an interview with Jubilee that she and Daniel are not sexually intimate, and instead, they share more of a "close friendship"-type bond.
Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins from Siam in Thailand, were joined only by a bit of liver and skin, and so had separate genitals.
They both got married to two different people, and judging by the fact that Chang had ten children, while Eng had 12, it is safe to say they both were able to be physically intimate with their other halves.
Abby and Brittany have never publicly spoken about their sex life, even despite all the questions thrown at them by the public, Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine gave us an insight into the unique situation.
"Based on what we know about the significant variability of one conjoined twin’s feeling a body part (e.g., an arm) that putatively 'belongs' to the other twin, it’s hard to guess how any conjoinment will turn out in practice," she wrote in an article for The Atlantic.
She also noted that things like nerves, muscles, hormones, and psychology all play a factor.
"If twins share one set of genitals, they’re both going to feel any touching down there. Whether or not both are 'having sex' with the third person in the equation depends on how you think about 'having sex,'" she continued.
Dreger also added that due to the difficulties involved, conjoined twins "probably end up having less sex than average people, and that is not only because sex partners are harder to find when you’re conjoined."
She also highlighted that they already have their "soulmate" attached to them so they aren't seeking that level of companionship that might be chased by those of us who feel physically or emotionally alone.
Another question revolves around the idea of having children.
The Hensel twins should be able to do so despite having only one reproductive system between them, and they have stated in the past that this is something they would like to explore further in the future.
In a documentary that has resurfaced, they said: "Yeah, we're going to be moms. We haven't thought about how being moms is going to work yet," per E! News.
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