That makes planning easy to interpret as a symptom: if intimacy has to be put on the calendar, spontaneity must already be dead. Adult life creates a different problem, though. Work doesn’t end at the same time, children don’t conveniently disappear, everyone has to get up in the morning, and an empty evening fills up with something more urgent surprisingly quickly.
So two people may still enjoy sex and desire each other, yet spend weeks waiting for the perfect moment that never arrives. Planning doesn’t manufacture desire on command — it creates a place where desire at least has a chance to show up.
And there’s an important distinction here: “We’re keeping the evening for intimacy” is not the same as “At 9 p.m. we are required to have sex.” You can change your mind, feel exhausted, want nothing more than cuddling, or order food and fall asleep halfway through a series.
Sometimes it isn’t the calendar that kills romance. Sometimes the endless “we’ll do it sometime when we have time” does a much better job.