When public records obtained by Today confirmed in late March 2024 that Abby Hensel had married nurse and U.S. Army veteran Josh Bowling on November 13, 2021, at the Jerome Event Center in Delano, Minnesota, the revelation detonated across social media and news sites with a force that the sisters had deliberately spent years avoiding. Dicephalic parapagus conjoined twins who share a single torso while each retaining her own head, brain, heart, stomach, spine, pair of lungs and spinal cord, Abby controls the right arm and leg while Brittany controls the left; they must coordinate every movement from walking and driving to typing emails and teaching a fifth-grade classroom at Sunnyside Elementary in New Brighton.
Their joint Facebook profile was quietly updated with a pH๏τograph showing the twins in a white wedding dress standing opposite Bowling, seen from behind in a gray suit holding Abby’s hand, providing one of the first widely circulated visual confirmations. Within days the sisters, then 34, posted a sequence of TikTok videos that media outlets widely interpreted as a measured response to the sudden attention. One caption simply read “The internet is extra LOUD today. We have always been around,” paired with images of ancient sculptures of two-headed figures and hashtags invoking happiness, love and marriage; the accompanying audio was Father John Misty’s “Real Love Baby.” A second clip juxtaposed the startled expression of the character Sulley from the animated film Monsters, Inc. with personal pH๏τographs from the wedding day and ordinary moments of their lives, captioned only with two eye-roll emojis. A third video featured images of the twins with Bowling overlaid by a voiceover stating, “This is a message to all the haters out there.
If you don’t like what I do but watch everything I’m doing, you’re still a fan.” These posts arrived more than two years after the private ceremony and after the sisters had largely withdrawn from the public eye following their 2012 TLC series Abby & Brittany, which chronicled their final year at Bethel University where both earned degrees in education. Born on March 7, 1990, in New Germany, Minnesota, to parents Patty, a registered nurse, and Mike, a carpenter and landscaper, the twins first appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1996 as children; doctors had advised against separation because the risk of losing one or both was too high, and the family chose to raise them as conjoined. By 2006, in the documentary Joined for Life, Brittany had already articulated a preference for privacy: “The whole world doesn’t need to know who we’re dating or what we’re gonna do and everything.”
The 2024 posts therefore functioned less as an invitation for further scrutiny and more as a reminder that the sisters had continued ordinary lives—teaching, sharing a body, navigating a blended family that includes Bowling’s daughter Isabella from a previous relationship—while the internet had simply looked elsewhere until the marriage records surfaced. Subsequent coverage noted that Abby did not list Brittany as a witness; the documents instead named their sister Morgan Hensel and a person identified as Cosmo Naut. Later in 2024 the account shared additional wedding footage, including a dance clip set to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” in which the twins had their arms around Bowling’s neck as they swayed. Throughout, the family has maintained that they prefer to live quietly in Minnesota. The posts themselves contained almost no new personal details beyond the visual confirmation of the union and the ᴀssertion that the sisters had never left; they simply refused to disappear when the noise arrived.
