I think it is a little more complicated than that (though I cannot give a good explanation). If you have two adjacent hydrogens that may even split each other, they may appear as two separate doublets if their chemical shifts are distant from one another. If their chemical shifts were closer together, you would find that the inner peaks of the doublets would have a greater intensity than the outer peaks. If you wished to calculate the chemical shifts and coupling constants, you would need to do a different calculation as the coupling shift from first order. If the chemical shifts become closer together, the inner peaks would continue to grow in intensity and the outer peaks would become wider and weaker. If the two hydrogens had the same chemical shift, they would no longer appear to split each other. This is the case for a compound like 1,2-dimethoxyethane. Even though the CH2-groups could split each other, because they have the same chemical shift, that coupling is lost. There are two singlets in the NMR.