Charis

Cheryl,
I don’t feel really comfortable with putting it this way:

we can assume that Adam and Eve had normal sexual relations in the garden just as they were commanded by God.

I don’t like your use of the work “commanded” in that context. I’ll use commissioned. They were commissioned to “be fruitful and multiply” not to “have sexual relations”. Some animals are fertile annually and that is when they mate. So, they can “be fruitful and multiply” and only have sex rarely.

Your point about “they will become one flesh” makes more sense as evidence that they did have marital relations, although I do not believe that becoming “one flesh”refers to mere physical “connection”. I believe it means much more than that. The other question mark about the context of the “one flesh” remark is that it is a general statement not really applying to the first man and woman since they had no father and mother to leave:

23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And, you are right that he does not mention increased desire. But God does tell Eve “your desire will be for your husband” in the context of mentioning increased pregnancy and childbirth twice. Many church fathers understood it as a sexual desire (in a very disrespectful demeaning manner). While I disagree with their disrespect of a woman’s sexual desire, I do wonder if they were seeing something that we have wrongfully dismissed (because we don’t want to acknowledge that the increased sexual desire of the woman is a consequence of the fall)?