I listened to this the other day — good stuff.
It made me think of Joss Whedon, and how he had to fight the network to keep Zoe (Gina Torres) and Wash (Alan Tudyk) to be a married couple in the
Firefly series, and that he deliberately showed them as sexually active and very much attracted to one another for all the reasons that you mentioned. He talks about it in one of the episode commentaries.