Quote: How have you managed to remove the "Desire" issue?
Good question. I've been thinking about this and as usual I have come up with a muddled analogy. A typical negative reaction to the idea of scheduled or loosely scheduled sex might be scheduled = routine = boring = no passion. The way to get around this sort of negative thinking is to recognize that you are considering sex within the context of marriage. Marriage itself is a sort of social agreement that encompasses everything from finances to child rearing to romance and it encompasses these things within the bounds of legal limits and cultural or religious conventions. These boundaries of marriage can be confining or comforting or both. By scheduling sex or coming to any other sort of mutual agreement regarding sexual activity, you can take it out of the realm of the purely physical or the purely emotional. The way you can do this with a positive attitude is by considering it ritual rather than routine.
By ritualizing sex within marriage, desire becomes much less of an issue. Consider other things that might be ritualized within the context of a marriage such as "eating together as a family", "going to church on Sunday", "decorating the Christmas tree two weeks after Thanksgiving" or "giving a kiss as you walk out the door in the morning". It doesn't need to be our concern whether our spouses are possessed of a great appetite as they sit down to the family meal or filled with thoughts of Godliness as they sit in the pew next to us or abounding in cheery Christmas spirit as they go fetch the tree or even consumed with loving thoughts as they kiss us goodbye in the morning. They do these things and we do these things because we understand the importance of all the little rituals in maintaining the larger ritual of marriage or family.
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that when you are considering emotional connection and sex within the context of marriage, the emotional connection formed during any particular encounter is not of as great importance as the emotional connection formed by the repeated ritual of encounters throughout the marriage. The problem of a SSM can be considered as a problem in forming or maintaining this sort of ritual. Therefore, an appropriate way to approach the problem would be the same way you would approach problems such as having a spouse who won't accompany you to church on Sunday or agree to eat together as a family or participate in holiday celebrations. The problem isn't that your spouse is too LD or that you are too HD, the problem is that you don't agree on the importance or perhaps the details of performance of the ritual of sex within the ritual of marriage.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
