Strangers on the street: please stop asking me if my wife is my twin sister
It is Pride month, and you know what that means. Anyone identifying as heterosexual must immediately present to the Office of Homosexual Affairs (OHA) to receive a list of instructions on how to comport themselves during this most hallowed of holidays.
OK, fine, I may be misrepresenting things somewhat. But I'm in manifesting mode: putting my hopes and dreams out there. And, in the absence of OHA, this gay has one humble request. Strangers on the street: please stop asking me if my wife is my twin sister!
This has been a longstanding problem. Indeed, I wrote about it in 2018 when my now wife was my pre-wife. While we do look vaguely similar we are not related. As I wrote then: 'She is an Ashkenazi Jew from Boston; I am a Palestinian from Brixton. I am not sure if our relationship is kosher or halal, but it is 100% incest-free.' Is it lazy and embarrassing to quote oneself? Yes. But because it is Pride month I am going to do it proudly anyway. It's been a bad year; us gays are tired.
Anyway, since I wrote that, time has marched relentlessly on. We got married, had a baby and approximately 9,742 arguments about the optimal way to stack the dishwasher. I figured that once people saw us strolling together en famille, a switch would click and strangers might stop demanding to know if we shared DNA. But no, the situation has only got worse; every few weeks some random person fields the question. The other day my wife came home from dropping the kid off at school and reported that the crossing guard ('lollipop lady' in Britain), had yelled down the street after her: 'HEY! ARE YOU AND THE OTHER ONE TWINS?'
Honestly, I'm starting to get a complex. Are my wife and I starting to look more and more alike as we age? Are we morphing into the same person? Or, and this is my preferred theory, is the uptick in questions due to the fact that we moved from New York (where most people politely ignore you) to Philadelphia (where, and I say this lovingly, nobody seems to have a filter)?
I know I recently wrote a piece about the importance of free speech but, this Pride month, some heterosexuals should learn to self-censor.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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