23 Things That Only Sisters Understand

1. Having someone in your life who you often do not want breathing in your direction yet who you’d still help hide the body if they asked.

2. How discussing the politically incorrect thing one of your parents just said is infinitely more gratifying with someone who cares and gets it like your sister does.

3. Having someone with whom you hold an exclusively mutual understanding of just how weird and dysfunctional your family is.

4. You had all the same things growing up, but one of you had everything in pink and the other had everything in blue or purple. That’s just how it went down.

5. The humiliation in having to wear matching dresses during the holidays and have elderly relatives ooh and ahh over how much you look alike.

6. Having another person on your crusade to find and destroy all of those family holiday Sears portraits in which one of you always looks sufficiently more awkward than the other but you are mutually as embarrassed about it and therefore out to destroy them all.

7. How nice it is to always have someone who knows exactly what you want for your birthday.

8. How nice it is to always have someone who knows exactly what dad wants for his birthday.

9. When they inevitably follow you to high school/college and your friends are like, well, this just… this makes a lot of sense right here. Okay.

10. Having to live with constantly being compared to one another or defined by the characteristics that differ you two entirely.

11. The fact that the older ones are always cool and the younger ones are always really annoying until they grow up and then also start acquiring cool stuff of which the older ones then steal.

12. The indescribable benefit of knowing your sister will always have something to wear to that party/dinner/date/interview that you’re in a bind for.

13. When they were born you either wanted to love them or sell them. A greater metaphor for your relationship now.

14. The disturbing ways they start to resemble your mother, in habits and appearance.

15.  How wonderful it is to have another human with which you can be unprecedentedly weird with.

16. How cool it is to have been talking about being their maid of honor and then actually getting to that day and trying to stop yourself from starting your speech with “we have literally been talking about this since we were 5.”

17. Having a bona fide, licensed break up buddy that’s been in training since your first middle school heartbreak.

18. They are always there to either make family vacations more bearable or infinitely less so. Usually both.

19. How cool it is to have someone you can be shitty around when you feel like shit because she’s both obligated to forgive you, will forget in a few minutes, and probably can’t stay mad for long because something funny will happen that she’ll have to tell you.

20. The fact that little sisters always end up being servants to the older ones, mostly because they will actually get them a cup of water if they whine enough.

21. The awesome day that one of you learns to drive and gets a job and all of a sudden you have a buddy to drag around with you everywhere.

22. You always have someone who will take your 3 a.m. calls, annoyed or not.

23. You always have a built in best friend… one whose been your partner in crime for your whole life. If that’s not the most supremely awesome thing, I don’t know what is.