Some friendships feel like soul connections, the kind where you can’t explain why you clicked with someone so quickly, or why a stranger suddenly feels like family.Most of the time, that feeling stays; most of us might have experienced this with one or the other person in our lives.But is it just a thought, or meant something more than this?One such story is about two women, an ocean away from where they were born, who spent decades calling each other “sis” as a joke between close friends, never once suspecting it might actually be true.
Meet Meena and Minal: Two sisters separated at birth united as best friends
Meena Geltink and Minal Tijssen were both born in India in the early 1980s and left as infants at separate orphanages before being adopted by different Dutch families, growing up roughly 130 kilometers apart in the Netherlands. Neither had any idea the other existed until 1996, when they crossed paths as teenagers at a gathering for adopted children.According to a BBC report, their friends noticed the resemblance immediately, and they realised they shared the same laughter and nose, and the two hit it off so strongly that they began jokingly calling each other “sis” in the letters they exchanged for years afterward, writing about school, boys, music, and their shared love of the Backstreet Boys.
The DNA test that changed it all
Minal moved to France, Meena became a mother, and the two lost touch for around 15 years. Then, back in 2017, Meena went to another meetup for Indian adoptees, and that’s where she first heard about DNA testing.Curious, she gave it a shot herself. Nothing came of it; no matches showed up, so life went on. In fact, earlier that year she deleted the app off her phone, mostly just to free up storage space.Then, out of nowhere, a message landed in her Facebook inbox from Minal reading “Meena: sister.” It took her a moment to even realize it was the same girl she’d bonded with three decades earlier.Asking if she remembered her, she attached a screenshot of the DNA match. As Meena described to the BBC, the two had noticed striking similarities the very first time they met as teens, joking about how alike their laughs and features were. This time, the resemblance had a scientific explanation: the test showed a full 100% match, confirming they share both biological parents.
Life is strangely beautiful
Speaking to Reuters, Minal talked about just how strange and fitting the whole situation felt, saying simply, “We were friends before we were sisters.” Meena, now a mother of three, told the BBC that the reunion felt like coming home, describing years of an unexplained emptiness that had finally been filled.Since then, the sisters have been in near-constant contact, speaking almost every day and introducing each other to their partners, children, and extended families.Both say they now hope to travel to Mumbai together someday, to walk through the city where their story technically began, decades before either of them knew it had
