Name: Robin Pinney
Age: 21
Year: Third
Major: Biological Anthropology and Global Studies
Hometown: Azusa, California (suburb of Los Angeles)
What is your favorite thing about having a twin?
My favorite thing is always having a friend there – My mom doesn’t live in our hometown anymore so going home for breaks would usually be rough without any friends immediately close by, but having a twin home also lessens that boredom.
How do people usually react when they find out you have a twin?
They are first very surprised, then they want to see a picture, want to know who is older, and then they think he is handsome and call dibs on him…I think there’s a line at this point.
What is your favorite/funniest memory together?
My favorite memory with my brother would probably be this one October month..we were maybe like 6 or 7, but my family is very into Halloween – it’s our favorite holiday. And that Halloween my costume was going to be Cassie, the pink dragon from Dragon Tales, and his was Spyro, the purple dragon from his favorite video game, and we wore our costumes the entire month. I remember, they were so thick and heavy and it was way too hot to have on all day but I remember running around every day until Halloween because we were so excited.
How different are your lives?
Our lives are very different in that when we were younger, we grew up very shy but in college, I grew out of it and he didn’t. He would rather have a small group of friends and stay in whereas I love to hang out with a lot of people all the time and do not like staying in. He goes to school in Fullerton, and I here in Santa Barbara so even just daily lives and what we do for fun are very different. I am proud though, because I’ve been in a sorority since my first year here and I’ve always tried convincing him to join a fraternity, because I love it so much. After two years of me nagging, he finally did it, and now he is in his own fraternity and loves it too! I’d like to think I helped him be more open minded and try new things in order to widen his college experience. Now we have a lot more to talk about because we can compare greek life at different schools and know more about the same things, considering our lives were so different before. We’re pretty much opposites but at the end of the day we have the same sense of humour, mind set, and movie taste!
Any weird “twin experiences”?
One time, I went to a sleepover at a friend’s house..I think we were about 12. And I guess I woke everyone up at the sleepover because I was fighting in my sleep – swinging my arms around and yelling and apparently it seemed like I was fighting with my brother because I kept repeating his name “Robert”. What makes this a weird experience is that my mom said that he was fighting in his sleep that night too, and he was fighting me. So I guess we were fighting each other in our dreams at the same exact time…probably the only weird twin thing that has happened to us.
Anything else you would like us to know?
Growing up with a twin brother you would think you’d have like a personal bodyguard but in fact he was never protective at all – he was always the instigator. The first person to make fun of me in a room was him, but eventually he grew out of it…sorta.