How conjoined twins Abby and Brittany make intimacy work

Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel have talked candidly about how they manage intimacy in their circumstances.

One of only a few sets of dicephalous twins in history, Abby and Brittany, 34, from Minnesota, share a single body from the waist down, including their genitalia, despite having two heads and two hearts.

The left twin, Brittany, is unable to feel anything on her right side of the body, and the right twin, Abigail, is also unable to feel anything on her left, but their limbs appear to move in unison.

When Abby chose to marry her husband in a private ceremony back in 2021, things grew more difficult, even though the twins, who first gained notoriety on a reality TV show, had to figure out how to handle many everyday tasks together.

@abbyandbrittanyhensel #marriage #love ♬ The Good Ones – Gabby Barrett

Many questioned how the couple handled intimacy and all the other aspects of marriage.

The 23-year-old conjoined twins, Lupita and Carmen Andrade, were born in Mexico but currently reside in Connecticut, USA. They share the same physical characteristics as Abby and Brittany, but Lupita is asexual, meaning she does not find other people attractive. Carmen, on the other hand, has a boyfriend named Daniel.

In contrast, Carmen disclosed in an interview with Jubilee that she and Daniel have a “close friendship”-like relationship rather than a sexual one.

Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins from Siam, Thailand, have separate genitalia since they were only partially united by skin and liver.

Both of them married two separate people, and it’s safe to assume that they were able to have physical intimacy with their spouses given that Chang had ten children and Eng had twelve.

Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, provided us with insight into the unusual circumstance of Abby and Brittany never discussing their sex life in public, despite all the questions the public has directed at them.

“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 said in a piece for The Atlantic.

She added that hormones, muscles, nerves, and psychology all have an impact.

“Twins will both feel any contact down there if they have the same set of genitalia. “Depending on your perspective on ‘having sex,’ both may or may not be ‘having sex’ with the third person,” she added.

Conjoined twins, Dreger continued, “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.”

Additionally, she emphasized that they already have their “soulmate” tied to them, so they are not looking for the kind of companionship that those of us who experience physical or emotional loneliness might pursue.

The concept of having children is another matter.

Despite only having one reproductive system between them, the Hensel twins ought should be able to do so, and they have previously expressed a desire to investigate this more in the future.

They stated in a resurrected documentary: “Yes, we will become mothers. According to E! News, “We haven’t considered how being mothers will work yet.”