What Happened When My Husband And I Had Sex Every Day For A Month

After a Reddit post claiming to be a spreadsheet of all the excuses a wife gave her husband to get out of sex went viral last week, HuffPost Live's Caitlyn Becker hosted a panel of women who discussed how marriage changes intimacy. One of the panelists had quite the success story.

Megan Conley talked about her blog post called Five Reasons You Should Have Sex With Your Husband Every Day, and while she told HuffPost Live that the post's title was "kind of facetious" because it's more about being intimate daily than actually having sex, she said she was committed to that idea in her own marriage.

"I go and work out every single day. I go to Zumba and humiliate myself in front of 45 women every single day because I decided my body is worth it and I'd like to wear a swimsuit at some point, so why can't I put 15 minutes a day toward my relationship?" Conley said.

And her spouse was more than willing to oblige.

"It was this challenge that my husband very happily accepted, so we decided to do that for a month, and sometimes it was 15 minutes and sometimes it was several hours, and it was fantastic," she said.

More frequent sex improved their relationship not only physically, but emotionally was well. Conley said that when her father died in February, she and her husband's dutiful work on their relationship allowed them to "see each other's souls" and communicate openly to help Conley heal.

"As a woman, when I saw sex as something that strengthened my relationship, it became much more interesting to me," she said.

Why do we pick the wrong men?

Timeless Lessons On Resilience From 

 

'Philosopher King' Marcus Aurelius

 

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 The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius is an ancient Roman statue in the Campidoglio, Rome 

 

Italy. It is made of bronze and stands 4.24 m tall.  Although the emperor is mounted, it exhibits 

 

many similarities to standing statues of Augustus. The original is on display in the Capitoline 

 

Museums, with the one now standing in the open air of the Piazza del Campidoglio being a replica 

 

made in 1981 when the original was taken down for restoration.

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 The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius ruled from 161 to 180 

 

AD, and developed a reputation for being the ideal wise leader 

 

Plato termed the "philosopher king."

 

Marcus has remained relevant for 1,800 years largely due to his 

 

writings collected as "Meditations," which President Bill Clinton 

 

has said is one of his favorite books. 

 

"Meditations" is not a typical philosophical treatise. It's closer to 

 

a diary. Marcus wrote the 12 books that make it up sometime 

 

during the last decade of his life. "That this was a dark and 

 

stressful period for him can hardly be doubted," Gregory Hays 

 

writes in the introduction to his translation of Marcus' original 

 

Greek. The emperor was faced with constant fighting, the 

 

rebellion of his general Cassius, the deaths of his wife and close 

 

friend, and the realization that his son Commodus was destined 

 

to be a bad ruler.

 

He dealt with these hardships by turning to philosophy, 

 

specifically the Stoicism of the ancient Greeks and his 

 

contemporary Roman philosophers. "Meditations" reveals that 

 

Marcus remained in control of his emotions through the beliefs 

 

that nature unfolds in a perfect way and that one must accept 

 

that they cannot change the past or what other people feel in 

 

their hearts. We went through Hays' translation and picked out 

 

some key points on one of the main themes of "Meditations," 

 

how to recover from massive setbacks.

 

Here are some of the philosopher king's timeless lessons on how 

 

to be resilient:

 

Don't worry about people whose actions don't affect the common 

 

good.

 

Your energy and time are both limited, so don't waste them on 

 

what inconsequential people are doing, thinking, and saying, 

 

when you could be focusing on your own issues.

 

Live in the present.

 

"Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been 

 

lived already, or is impossible to see," Marcus writes.

 

Refrain from imposing your feelings onto reality.

 

Your company collapses, your house burns down, you lose all 

 

your money - none of these are "bad" (or "good" for that 

 

matter), according to Marcus' philosophy. When you see things 

 

as what they really are, you're able to avoid succumbing to your 

 

emotions and accept what has happened.

 

Turn an obstacle into an opportunity.

 

Ryan Holiday's new book "The Obstacle Is the Way" is based off 

 

this Stoic fundamental, which says that we should use inevitable 

 

challenges as a chance to become a stronger person. Holiday 

 

likes Nassim Taleb's definition of a Stoic, who is someone who 

 

"transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, 

 

mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

 

Find peace within yourself.

 

Marcus writes that people try to retreat from their problems and 

 

responsibilities by going somewhere like the mountains or the 

 

beach, but that travel isn't necessary to recollect yourself. He 

 

advocates a kind of brief meditation, where you withdraw into 

 

yourself and quiet your mind.

 

Don't resent people for their character.

 

If someone's character flaw has caused one of your problems, do 

 

not exert energy trying to change that person's character. Let 

 

things go. "You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting 

 

juice," Marcus says.

 

You are the only person responsible for your happiness.

 

"Choose not to be harmed - and you won't feel harmed. Don't 

 

feel harmed - and you haven't been," Marcus writes. 

 

Furthermore, the only way people can truly harm you is if they 

 

change your character.

 

We first read about Hay's accessible translation in Holiday's 

 

book on Stoicism, " The Obstacle Is the Way:The Timeless Art of 

 

Turning Trials into Triumph." 

 Intuition Pumps: Daniel Dennett on the Dignity and Art-Science of Making Mistakes

“The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself.”

 “If you are not making mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks," Debbie Millman counseled. “Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before," Neil Gaiman advised young creators. In Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, the inimitable Daniel Dennett, one of our greatest living philosophers, offers a set of thinking tools — “handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus holders” — that allow us to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions” — to enhance your cognitive toolkit. He calls these tools “intuition pumps” — thought experiments designed to stir “a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition” (which we know is a pillar of even the most "rational" of science) about the question at hand, a kind of persuasion tool the reverse-engineering of which enables us to think better about thinking itself. Intuition, of course, is a domain-specific ability that relies on honed critical thinking rather than a mystical quality bestowed by the gods — but that’s precisely Dennett’s point, and his task is to help us hone it.

Though most of his 77 “intuition pumps” address concrete questions, a dozen are “general-purpose” tools that apply deeply and widely, across just about any domain of thinking. The first of them is also arguably the most useful yet most uncomfortable: making mistakes.

Echoing Dorion Sagan case for why science and philosophy need each other, Dennett begins with an astute contribution to the best definitions of philosophy, wrapped in a necessary admonition about the value of history:

The history of philosophy is in large measure the history of very smart people making very tempting mistakes, and if you don’t know the history, you are doomed to making the same darn mistakes all over again. … There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

 
 He speaks for the generative potential of mistakes and their usefulness as an empirical tool:

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them — if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Therein lies the power of mistakes as a vehicle for, as Rilke famously put it, “living the questions” and thus advancing knowledge in a way that certainty cannot — for, as Richard Feynman memorably noted, the scientist’s job is to remain unsure, and so seems the philosopher’s. Dennett writes:

We philosophers are mistake specialists. … While other disciplines specialize in getting the right answers to their defining questions, we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are of getting things so mixed up, so deeply wrong, that nobody is even sure what the right questions are, let alone the answers. Asking the wrong questions risks setting any inquiry off on the wrong foot. Whenever that happens, this is a job for philosophers! Philosophy — in every field of inquiry — is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new. Before there can be learning, there must be learners. There are only two non-miraculous ways for learners to come into existence: they must either evolve or be designed and built by learners that evolved. Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error — and without the errors the trials wouldn’t accomplish anything.

Dennett offers a caveat that at once highlights the importance of acquiring knowledge and reminds us of the power of "chance-opportunism":

Trials can be either blind or foresighted. You, who know a lot, but not the answer to the question at hand, can take leaps — foresighted leaps. You can look before you leap, and hence be somewhat guided from the outset by what you already know. You need not be guessing at random, but don’t look down your nose at random guesses; among its wonderful products is … you!

And since evolution is the highest epitome of how the process of trial and error drives progress, Dennett makes a case for understanding evolution as a key to understanding everything else we humans value:

Evolution … is the central, enabling process not only of life but also of knowledge and learning and understanding. If you attempt to make sense of the world of ideas and meanings, free will and morality, art and science and even philosophy itself without a sound and quite detailed knowledge of evolution, you have one hand tied behind your back. … For evolution, which knows nothing, the steps into novelty are blindly taken by mutations, which are random copying “errors” in DNA.

Dennett echoes Dostoyevsky (“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”) and offers the key to making productive mistakes:

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. … The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.

We have all heard the forlorn refrain “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” is standing on the threshold of brilliance.

 

In fact, Dennett argues in considering what makes us human, one of the hallmarks of our intelligence is our ability to remember our previous thinking and reflect on, learn from it, use it to construct future thinking. Reminding us to beware our culture's deep-seated fear of being wrong, he advocates for celebrating the "ignorance" that produced the mistake in the first place:

So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. It’s not easy. The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when we are angry at ourselves), and you have to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.

Dennett turns to card magicians for an analogy: Many of their “tricks” actually rely on chance to work, but they’ve devised numerous strategies of varying complexity to smoothly mask for the failed tricks in which chance isn’t in their favor. Their mistakes thus become invisible but their successes, those instances in which chance appears magical, become gloriously visible to the audience’s awe and delight. Dennett compares this to science:

Evolution works the same way: all the dumb mistakes tend to be invisible, so all we see is a stupendous string of triumphs. For instance, the vast majority — way over 90 percent — of all the creatures that have ever lived died childless, but not a single one of your ancestors suffered that fate. Talk about a line of charmed lives!

One big difference between the discipline of science and the discipline of stage magic is that while magicians conceal their false starts from the audience as best they can, in science you make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them. … It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

 

Returning to Gaiman's point about brilliantly original mistakes, Dennett ends with a wonderful and necessary addition to history's finest thinking on criticism, reminding us that critics simply tell us our thinking is original and notable enough to be worthy of dissent:

Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes. Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.

Of course, in general, people do not enjoy correcting the stupid mistakes of others. You have to have something worth correcting, something original to be right or wrong about. . . .

Complement Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking with This Will Make You Smareter, one of the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012, in which 151 of our time’s biggest thinkers — including Dennett — each select a single scientific concept that will improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit.