First off, you provide and protect to legitimize and prioritize all social bonds. Not just sexual ones.

In order to get the benefits of social bonds, those bonds have to be maintained, broad scale, throughout the population.

Women do this instinctually because we have evolved with gynoecological strategies to get us through childbirth, which is more costly and deadly for us humans than any other species. Solid reproductive strategies and the development of midwifery are the reason we have thrived as a species.

So yes, women provide and protect too. Always have. Always will.

But men don't face that possibility of debilitating permanent injury or death as part of their reproductive process so it doesn't come as naturally to them on that evolutionary pressure.

Hence the inclusion of being a provider and protector as part of the role of manhood. But that role was never meant to subordinate women or be tied to sexual relationships. That came later as a later perversion of social bonds along with Patriarchy.

What we have now is unnatural and why it's slowly and surely tearing apart broader social bonds that our species has relied upon for survival. That warping is now it's own evolutionary pressure that is and has changed our behaviors in some pretty profound and detrimental ways.