The pill may have taken away an excuse that could have built up the anticipation without causing rejection

This from http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/can-married-couples-much-sex

When sex is “on the table” on a near-daily basis, a predictable pattern tends to develop. Men have a higher sex drive, and strongly associate sex with closeness and relationship health. Women comparatively place greater weight on other forms of interaction, and on a physiological level, their appetite for sex simply tends to be lower. Thus, when marital intimacy is perpetually possible, women can easily fall into the habit of putting it off, or even coming to see it as a chore. It’s also well known by now that hormonal contraceptives tend to decrease sexual appetite. So by preparing themselves physiologically to have sex at any time, women make it so that they rarely or never want to.

Should we be at all startled that this does not add up to a recipe for marital health? Men start to feel that they are perpetually begging, which is hurtful and degrading. Women start to feel that they are forever badgered and never wooed. Resentment grows on both sides.

The passive-aggressive spreadsheet-keeping husband illustrates an important point about sex and marriage. His problem isn’t just that he doesn’t get to enjoy marital intimacy with his wife as often as he would like. The real sting lies in the sense of rejection that derives from her lack of enthusiasm. One can easily imagine another couple whose marital relations were just as (in)frequent, but who felt secure in the knowledge that both were looking forward to the next available opportunity. Which couple would be happier, closer or more fulfilled?

When marriage was understood more traditionally, as a foundation for family, this created a natural script. It provided a context that helped married couples retain the romance. Sometimes natural obstacles (like infertility) require people to vary the plot a bit, but as every composer knows, good variations require a theme. Lacking that, modern couples find themselves quibbling over whether his desire for sex should trump the fact that she “feels grungy.” Everyone ends up feeling aggrieved and dissatisfied.

Like every other sort of relationship (but more so!) marriage is more satisfying when it’s about something. A marriage is meant to be an unusually involved and lengthy sort of relationship, so the “subject” matter should probably be more significant than a shared love of basketball and a passion for American Idol. Any idea what might fill the bill?

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...

If the universe is eternal and determinism is true, then...

...in that case it would be possible in principle to retrodict the past ad infinitum. The present would either contain an infinite amount of information or the universe would be cyclical, albeit (methinks) in a manner analogous to the plot of the Lorenz attractor.

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