A pair of conjoined twins have candidly opened up about how dating works for them given that one of them is asexual.
Lupita and Carmen Andrade are 22-year-old conjoined twin sisters who live in Connecticut.
The young women, who moved to the US from Mexico when they were infants, are attached at the torso and share a pelvis and reproductive system.
Both ladies have two arms but only one leg each.
Despite the unique position they are in, one of the two sisters (Carmen) has a boyfriend. The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that Lupita is asexual.
However, the sisters have found a way to make it work for both of them.
Carmen is in a relationship with a man called Daniel, who she met on the dating app Hinge in 2020.
Carmen met Daniel on the dating app Hinge in 2020. Credit: NurPhoto / Getty
“I never tried to hide the fact that I’m a conjoined twin, which meant I got a lot of messages from guys with fetishes. I knew right off the bat that Daniel was different from the others, because he didn’t lead with a question about my condition,” she told Today in 2023. “I have social anxiety, and I’ve ended up canceling dates at the last minute, but I felt calm on the way there.”
She added: “We’ve been together for two and a half years, and we’ve discussed getting engaged, but we want to live together first.
“Sometimes I feel bad because I want to spend so much time with Daniel. So we try to come up with compromises. Like, (Lupita) will choose where we go out to dinner, or what activity we’re going to do.”
Lupita will often choose where she, Carmen and Daniel go out for dinner. Credit: 10’000 Hours / Getty
Lupita and Daniel get on well, Carmen shared, with the young woman telling Today: “It’s funny because I stay up later than Lupita, but when Daniel’s sleeps over, I fall asleep quickly — and he stays up talking with her.”
As for whether children will be in their future, the twin said: “We can’t have kids, we don’t want kids and my partner feels the same way,” Carmen says.
Elsewhere in the interview, it was revealed that because they have separate brains, they don’t have to sleep simultaneously; one of them can be awake while the other sleeps.
“If one of us is tired, we both don’t have to both be tired because we have two separate brains,” Carmen stated. “Yes, one of us can be awake and one of us can be asleep because, again, different brains. We are two separate people.”