How to make a character perfectly symmetrical

Hi everyone. I have a character I am building that I will eventually move to Animate. My current process is create a shape, then chop it in half, next bring the shapes together and unit or shape builder them. This usually results in two tiny anchor points right next to eachother which is annoying and doesn't creat perfect symmetry. One side of the character is always just a little bit different than the other. Surely, SURELY, there is a better way to do this. Other problem solutions, besides manually subtracting anchors, was also selecting and "averaging" the anchors but that always seems to create a twisted path... Simplifying works until it has two anchors left, and won't simplify more after that. Thank you in advance for the insight.