Extreme childhood emotional deprivation can actually cause death, but less extreme deprivation will still wreck havoc with one's future relationships, especially those dealing with intimacy and sexuality. The hormonal surge at puberty doesn't create the sex drive, they write, it only eroticizes the drive which was created much earlier. We tend to fall in love and be attracted to those who seem to be from families who were like our own but sometimes those attractions are not healthy as they are not the ones which will further our best interests. One study cited showed that 84 percent of homosexual men said that their fathers were indifferent to them. This was compared to only 10 percent of the heterosexual men studied.
Lesbians have poorer relationships with their mothers than heterosexual woman.
There is also a correlation in both with early sexual abuse. Even mothering is not an instinctive drive as some women make terrible mothers. The authors say that the sexual instinct is really not that powerful. What makes it appear that way is all of the trained learning we get. Here is where the reader gets a pitch that we can get trained out of our seemingly irresistible sex drives.