People assume twins are close, but my sister and I weren't. As adults, we lived together for 8 months and became best friends.

• My twin sister and I weren't best friends growing up, despite the assumptions about twins.
• Our parents allowed — even encouraged — us to be individuals, and I'm thankful for that.
• It wasn't until we lived together for eight months a few years ago that we really became close.

People usually assume twins are figuratively attached at the hip and best friends, but that wasn't the case for my sister and me until we were almost 35. And I'm actually thankful my parents made an effort to ensure we could develop as individuals.

This meant insisting on us having different teachers throughout school — they even enrolled us in different high schools — and encouraging us to pursue the extracurricular activities that we wanted to do.

Even though they encouraged us to build our own lives, other people often assumed we came as a package deal. We either both got invited to birthday parties, or neither of us did. If one of us was doing an activity, we'd get questions about why the other wasn't participating. In school, the teachers often compared our achievements.

All of this contributed to us being fiercely competitive, hampering our ability to get to know each other. Looking back, I think we both felt pressure to achieve similar results because of the comparisons others would make of us when we didn't, and we felt a lot of misguided jealousy when one of us got more accolades or attention.

We lived together after college, but our friendship didn't develop

We attended different colleges but found ourselves both with job offers in Washington, DC, after graduating, and decided that it would be better to live together than with a stranger.

But instead of becoming closer, the move damaged what little of a friendship we had. We each had preconceived notions of the other's personality and lifestyle and found ourselves bickering nonstop. There was also unrealistic self-inflicted pressure to do everything together since we were now twins living with each other, which led to lots of frustration.

After a year of intense fighting, my sister moved to New York City while I stayed in DC.

We visited each other once or twice over the next three years, but it always felt like they were obligatory visits because that's what twins should do and not because we were close friends.

We had to address our differences when we ended up living together again

A decade later, my now-husband and I had moved to New York City, and my sister and her husband were still there. My twin and I were on better terms and basically on the level of good acquaintances, but we still didn't see each other often despite living in the same city.

When the pandemic hit, the four of us, plus my sister's 5-month-old son, decided to leave the city. We fled to my parents' house in the mountains of North Carolina, thinking we'd be there for a few weeks, but it turned into nearly eight months of living together.

We had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to see. Living with my twin gave us no choice but to get to know each other and confront our existing assumptions. This didn't come without its fair share of screaming matches, storming off after arguments, and periods of silent treatment, but in the end, we figured out we were way more similar than we had given each other credit for.

By the time we both moved to Raleigh, NC, we had become best friends.

I wish we had worked on our relationship sooner

I'm sad it took us this long to become best friends, but thankful that living together for those eight months forced us to get to know each other. I'd like to think that we would have gotten to where we are now at some point anyway, but I honestly don't know if there would have been any other scenario that would have forced us to really get to the root of our issues.

Now, we live five minutes apart, text all day, and see each other at least a few times a week. We are more attached at the hip now than we've ever been.

Society thinks twins will naturally want to be together all the time, and that assumption can make it tough when we don't meet that expectation. I wish other people could have seen my sister and me as individuals and just sisters growing up instead of assuming we were a two-for-one deal for everything.