They’re as close as twins can be. But with one getting married, what’s the other to do?
Kelly and Meghan Fillnow must be among the closest identical-twin sisters in the Carolinas, and quite possibly in the U.S., and maybe even on the entire planet. That’s just a hunch, but probably a good one.
They have lived together in the Charlotte area for almost their entire lives — including, as adults, for the past 14 years. They work together; both are triathlon, running and lifestyle coaches, representing a coaching business that bears their last name. And on top of all that, they play together in the same sport; Kelly is a professional triathlete and Meghan is one of the top amateurs in the world.
Kelly may be stating the obvious, but it is absolutely, positively true: “Not many twins,” she says, “go through life like we have.”
Asked to put a label on their relationship, Kelly replies that “it’s everything. It’s definitely all of the above. Sisters, best friends, twins, old married couple. ... I mean, I think a marriage might get to that point, but at the same time, like —”
“It’s a different dynamic,” Meghan interjects, finishing her sister’s sentence.
“Yeah,” Kelly continues, clarifying that they actually don’t know that for sure, because “we haven’t experienced that yet.”
She’ll get to know what that’s like soon, though. On the afternoon of Dec. 17 — a month and a half shy of her and Meghan’s 40th birthdays — Kelly will marry Steven Petrea at Lingle Chapel at Davidson College, where from 2001-2005 the sisters enjoyed successful tennis careers both as individuals and (no surprise here, really) as doubles partners.
It’s a looming occasion that fills Kelly with joy, and Meghan can’t help but feel thrilled for her sister, too.
That said, for some very complicated reasons, the past several months have been a lot more emotionally difficult than either of them anticipated. Not just because these practically-joined-at-the-hip twins moved to separate homes this month and will thereby naturally become less close, even if only slightly.
But also because Meghan has long felt like she’s trailed behind Kelly, and always dreamed that marriage would be one thing she’d get to first.
The same, but also quite different
I was introduced to Kelly in November 2009, when she was still relatively new to the sport of triathlon — but already pretty good at it.
She’d just posted a remarkable result in her debut Ironman in Panama City Beach, Florida, where she finished as the fifth-fastest female amateur out of more than 650 women in the 140.6-mile race (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, 26.2-mile run); I’d reached out because I wanted to write about her for a blog I wrote about the Charlotte running community at the time.
Meghan and I met the following August, after she finished ninth out of 159 women at an Olympic-distance triathlon (1,500-meter swim, 24.3-mile bike, 10-kilometer run) in Mooresville. They’ve been good friends of mine for years now.
And the more you get to know them, the more the dynamics in their relationship as twin sisters stand out.
One of the main things that is quickly apparent is that they seem to very often be in the same place at the same time. And if they’re not, they seem to always know exactly where the other is and what the other is doing.
Another, which takes a little longer to recognize but eventually becomes just as clear, is that Kelly generally has the more dominant personality.
For instance, she’s the one who founded Fillnow Coaching in 2012 and remains in charge of the business, while Meghan — a former schoolteacher — joined as a head coach the following year and is technically an employee. When their lease on a house ended in 2018, it was Kelly who made the leap to home-ownership, with Meghan then moving in with her technically as a renter.
On top of all that, Kelly has competed for years in triathlon at the professional level. Meghan never has.
Just this month, Kelly finished 25th out of 52 pros at the legendary Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. She beat Meghan, who was competing as an amateur, by nearly half an hour. Of course, Meghan is hardly any slouch. Her 10-hour, 13-minute finish was the fastest by any amateur American woman at Worlds, and this month, she retained her spot as the No. 1 amateur Ironman athlete on the planet in her age group.
But still, the roles seem clear: Kelly sets the agenda, Meghan follows along.
It’s been this way since they were little girls.
‘I always felt never good enough’
When they were growing up, they say, their parents encouraged them to establish their own identities. They weren’t given rhyming or alliterative names. They weren’t forced to wear matching outfits or get matching haircuts.
Kelly and Meghan formed a strong bond at a young age, though, and throughout their childhoods they repeatedly gravitated toward and away from the same sports at pretty much the same times. On top of that, they had the same class schedules from second grade on through high school.
“There are a lot of advantages to having a friend to do things with, and partner with, and be together with,” Meghan says of how close their athletic pursuits and academic advisers kept them. “But I think it was also challenging because you always are compared. ... People would always ask, ‘Who’s the smarter one?’ ‘Who’s better at this, and that?’”
So, understandably, it made it even harder for the two of them to ignore how they stacked up against each other. And on paper, Kelly frequently had the edge.
Kelly batted leadoff on their youth girls softball team, for example, while Meghan batted second. As teens, Kelly consistently trained on the court for top-level players at the prestigious Van Der Meer Tennis Academy in Hilton Head, South Carolina, while Meghan was one tier down. When they graduated from high school, Kelly was crowned valedictorian, while Meghan was salutatorian.
Growing up, Meghan says, those things — and jokes from peers about how “the only time you were faster than Kelly was when you came out of the womb” — ate away at her self-esteem. “I always felt never good enough,” she says, “and always under Kelly’s shadow.”
They both agree, however, that being the best seemed to matter more to Kelly than Meghan.
And while Meghan may have felt competitive with her sister, she felt like she was being led toward a simple life. She never had dreams of athletic superstardom, never had aspirations for some big fancy career, never cared a whole lot about the idea of fame, or money, or power.
“Ever since I was a little girl, all I wanted was to be married and have kids,” Meghan says, as her voice starts to quaver and her eyes begin to well up. She and Kelly both have explained to me how, when they played with Barbies as girls, Meghan’s family of dolls was always bigger. “I mean, I thought I’d get married at 26 and have four kids by the time I was in my early 30s. I just thought that was the reason I was here. I never even considered it not happening. ...
“I guess I was naive.”
Single and 30-(almost 40-)something
Meghan is 39, almost 40, and that can be a delicate subject for her. Because in her mind, she’s nearing — or possibly even past — her expiration date.
“At my age, most guys are married, or they don’t want to be with someone my age if they want to have kids, or they don’t want kids at all,” she says, wiping away more tears. “And if you do the math in your head, I mean, relationships take time to develop, then you get married and then you try to have a kid ... that all takes time — and it’s like, I’m not even in a relationship.”
It’s not like she hasn’t put herself out there.
She says she’s been in a few healthy, solid long-term relationships over the course of her 20s and 30s. She’s tried blind dates, online dating, and dating apps (although she says she struggles particularly with dating apps because she’s not comfortable with the idea of dating several people at once). In 2018, friends successfully campaigned to get The Charlotte Observer’s CharlotteFive website to crown her the city’s “most eligible bachelorette.”
Meanwhile, up until a couple years ago, Kelly was doing almost none of that stuff. She barely ever talked about dating and had gone years without a boyfriend of any significance.
And there was pretty pointed — and poignant — reason for it, turns out: Whereas Kelly seemed to always be one step ahead in so many other aspects of their lives, for much of their adult lives she was actually trying to let Meghan get to the altar and to motherhood first.
“Just because I knew how much she wanted that to happen,” Kelly says. “Especially because I know how she always felt growing up ... like I was a little inch above. I always told myself she would start (a family) first, check the box, and then I can figure myself out — after she gets where she wants to go. Not that she’s ‘winning,’ but I just wanted that for her. ...
“It’s been the biggest prayer of my life, to pray for her husband.”
‘It’s like I’m losing half of my heart’
Steven Petrea was a coaching client of Meghan’s before he was a love interest of Kelly’s.
It didn’t initially seem like an obvious match. Steven has a quiet demeanor and tightly structures his routines. Kelly can much more easily deal with being the center of attention and seems to thrive on chaos. They knew each other for four years before going out for the first time. But during that lunch date, back in July 2020, she had a weird feeling: I know, she told her sister, that I’m going to marry this guy.
She called it. In February 2022, Kelly got a ring from Steven. Pretty quickly after that, Kelly and Meghan’s relationship as sisters got complicated.
Kelly and Steven signed a deal to build a house, meaning Kelly would need to sell her place and Meghan would need to find somewhere to live on her own. As a result, the sisters — who’ve spent nearly 10 years doing much of their work for Fillnow Coaching side by side — would need to develop a new plan for their workdays.
Those are just logistics, though. They’re manageable. The emotional challenges are what’s turned out to cause the greatest angst.
“It’s gonna be one of the best days of my life, to see my sister marry her soul love,” Meghan says of Kelly’s impending wedding, “but I think at the same time it’ll be hard because ... she’s part of my heart, and it’s like I’m losing half of my heart. And for her, she’s giving that half of her heart to a man. But for me, where does that go?”
I ask Kelly what it’s like to hear Meghan express this.
“I carry, I guess, a lot of guilt,” she says, looking at her sister. “It’s just hard to want to celebrate and feel excited ... when I know that’s exactly what she wants. And where she wants to be going with her life. I feel like I’m stealing that from her.
“Then also ... I have crippling fear, too. So it all kind of —”
“The fear of what?” Meghan asks, interjecting.
“Just the fear of your life not panning out the way you want it to,” Kelly says. “But I think it’s important for us to flip the story in our mind, too. We had this vision for our life, back when we were kids ... but that story is not unfolding. So I think, for me, I’m just trusting that God’s story is better than the story that we imagined.”
Moving on, and making the best of it
Meghan’s not naive anymore.
You can’t tell her, “Oh, don’t worry. It’ll all work out in the end. You’ll find someone!” and expect that to make her feel better. “I mean, I guess because I’ve been waiting for so long, and I kept thinking, ‘It’s gonna happen this year, it’s gonna happen!’ It’s been literally 18 years. There comes a point where you’re just like, ‘OK, well, maybe it won’t happen.’”
But she’s also trying to keep things in perspective.
“You know, all the stories that you do are about really hard stuff,” she tells me one afternoon. “The woman who went blind. Or people dealing with real tragedies. Cancer. Dying from COVID. Moving over here from another country and someone stealing everything from you.
“I have such a good life and so many people that are amazing in my life.”
So these days, Meghan has been constantly reminding herself that she’s fortunate to have a great family — not just her twin, but also nearby parents, and a brother with a wife and their four children — as well as a huge network of friends and a great group of athletes who she builds up every day and who in turn build her up.
She’s come around to viewing a little separation and independence from her sister as an opportunity for her life to spin off into a new and unexpected direction.
She’s started the process of freezing her eggs. “To protect something I’ve always wanted,” she says. “To protect my future in a sense.”
And when she gets a date, she still allows herself to be excited. To be hopeful.
“You haven’t cried at all this time,” I point out, when I sit down with Kelly and Meghan in September, a couple weeks after a one-on-one with Meghan during which she was in tears almost the whole time.
“Well, it could be because she has a friend that’s setting her up with someone,” Kelly says, laughing. “If you really want to know the truth, honestly. Last time there was no hope, but now there’s like a teeny tiny —”
“Oh my goodness!” Meghan blurts. “See what I have to live with??”
“I mean, if there is a chance of something,” Kelly says, shrugging and flashing a big grin, “then there is a change in her.”
As if on cue, there’s a change in Meghan ... specifically in her face: It turns bright red, her eyes roll, and her mouth curls into a smile — one that, it’s worth noting, is even bigger than her sister’s.
This story was originally published October 24, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
