*facepalm* I hear you about the sex scenes. As a writer, I find them an interesting challenge (like fight scenes!)--plus I can be sure that the sex is always interesting to me at the moment I'm writing it. As a reader, the odds that someone else's smut is going to hit me in just the right way exactly when I'm reading it is a lot smaller. Not the fault of the smut at all, just a sort of narrowness of the parameters as a reader...

It actually took my husband and I a while to find a balance with him as a beta. Because I really was hoping for more enthusiastic involvement, but he approaches stories very much as logic puzzles, with a real detachment. He is just not a squeeing sort of guy. That made me kind of sad at first (this is a polite euphemism for "I locked myself in the bedroom and cried") and for a while we had this elaborate system where he was required to find at least one thing per thousand words that he could compliment as working on an emotional level. But over time I kind of came to understand that he didn't see stories "on an emotional level" the way I did. I had to learn to value his sort of intellectual appreciation of the plot and writing style and not expect him to be like, "That moment where you had X say Y, it ripped my heart out." :)

This has become quite a ramble! Sex scenes and betas will prompt long-winded discussions from me every time. :)