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From another conservative standpoint, family is long-term commitment, a stable home for children, and conservation of property. From that viewpoint, a person will think lifelong marriages are better than happy single life, and encourage a married couple to stay together "for the children" even if they can't stand each other: but the logic will apply as much to two women, or two men, or two men and a woman, who are raising children together as to one man and one woman doing so. (There's a bit in a Rebecca Ore novel about a mixed-species society where we learn that the marriage vows are "until the children are grown." Before the first child comes, or once they're all adult, stay together if you like, or not, but that's an internal matter, not a concern of the rest of society.)

Conservatives also seem to feel that families are an ongoing, multigenerational set of social obligations into which you are born, and which are almost entirely dependent on the accident of your birth. You are thereby expected to carry them on, since they don't "belong to you," exactly, and you don't really get a say in them. (Which is why people who do things like "run away to the big city" to live in sin with their significant others and become experimental performance artists bother the snot out of them -- they'd vastly prefer if everyone had no option but to have a life as constricted and miserable as theirs. These are the same people who generally believe that the concept of "having fun" is replaced with the sense of "acting responsibly" -- and that the two are mutually exclusive -- around the age of majority.)

If that's what you think a family is, screw you, I don't want one.