This makes heterosexual marriage difficult. Women, who remain erotically heterosexual, are encouraged to look elsewhere for relational needs. She may do this through relationships with other women or by have children. Having children recreates the primary intense unit that a heterosexual relationship recreates for men. Both sexes are looking for a return to the emotional and physical union with the mother.
Men simultaneously seek and fear exclusivity.
Women have different and more complex relational needs that an exclusive relationship with a man cannot fulfill. So the two structural principles of the family are in contradiction with each other. The family reproduces itself in form but at the same time undercuts itself in content. People form heterosexual couples, but as a result of men and women being parented by women, these heterosexual relationships are strained and difficult. In earlier times the father was less absent, the family was centered on production and the sexes were economically interdependent.