A Gordian knot

Sex was written about in the Bronte books as a hidden thing, something which with the contrived courtship and the so called unspoken chivalry, men of breeding were supposed to offer the gentler sex a flirtatious gavotte where etiquette was the subject matter which society agreed made the match, not raw desire.
Today we elevate desire above all else. The desire for a new car or a television ranks with the desire for a new woman or simply that woman who had just strolled into the pub tonight. It's a phenomena on which both sexes are engaged with equal fervour. The demure woman has been replaced by a person who believes that sex is not an act of procreation but for fun and getting as much fun is what life is all about. 
Women today are equally open eyed in their desire to experience the unique pleasure of carnal coupling. The act is enough to banish traditional values of reserving yourself for your wedding day and ensuring the out come was in line with the churches teaching.
And so, the assumed instinctive responsibility to afford to give the child, your undivided attention and the 'ware with all' to see its needs are met until it leaves the nest, are prorogued by the hormonal rush which lies at the base of our universal survival.  But unless these obligations are understood then that short hurried encounter on the back seat of a Ford Mondeo has the inevitable capacity for being ranked as the ultimate self serving declaration, "I don't give a damn".
There are of course many strong women who see the issue of having a baby a personal endeavour with the male sidelined as a bit actor in a play. Their desire is rooted in the 'mother thing' which men little understand. The desire to have a child can be shared by men and women but the emotional arithmetic is always skewed  towards the woman based as it is on a deep maternal sensibilities, which men can never quite understand.
Men can grow to love that new born child, especially as the child develops but the intricate sensibilities involved in carrying and conserving, acting essentially as a human resource to the embryo, come child, is so far away from what a man can be expected to understand and he is truly cast as a bit actor. 

In the inevitable tussle in later life as to primacy between the man and woman, the bar has been set too high for the male. As in so much else he has to accept the role of being a Sherpa, someone who carries the heavy weights but unfortunately, the bag never really contains his own stuff 
It's one of the conundrums of society which insists on monogamy as the construct between men and women. The attempt by society to see that the needs of the child are protected as far as they can be, at least in a fiscal sense, the man contributing to the costs of child raising by focusing on the one union. 

It can be a tension throughout life this inequality between husband and wife as soon as a child is born, the man's rights are properly subpoenaed to the female/child combo in a societal pact to protect mother and child. It places on the man the emotional straight jacket that he is constrained in the relationship to mind his Ps and Qs, or else. The trauma of loosing his children is his and his alone. We properly balk at separating a mother and child under almost any circumstances but happily commit men into the dreadful torment of being separated from his children at divorce and worse, place the access to the child at the whim of the mother who often has an axe to grind. 

Much of this stems from the unequal relationship to the child and men who rightly put such weight on their relationship with the child better understand just what a Gordian knot they are undertaking, but of course they never do.