Thinking about how out of Maurice and Clive, Clive is the one who mythologizes and clings to the Platonic ideal for how to express his romantic/sexual attraction to Maurice and what their relationship should manifest as. A philosophical, transcendent, intangible ideal that he imagines as a meeting of the minds beyond what feeling can put into words, much like how the idea of "romance" is mythologized today as some transcendental feeling "beyond" friendship that you can't describe, "you just know it when you know."
Meanwhile, Maurice is the one who describes what he is searching for as a friend, with all the earthiness of the word's Germanic roots, "someone you can share your whole life with." And sometimes---he acknowledges (unlike Clive)---he wants to have sex with that Friend. Maurice's conception of his own romantic and sexual attraction (a friend who you have sex with) is much more aligned with an asexual or aromantic's conception of romance or lifelong partnership that has deconstructed amatonormativity. Rather than pedestalizing romance as some intangible, supreme ideal that transcends the physical or mundane, Maurice is simply looking for a friend, in all the simplicity of the word, and given that he obviously has other friends that he is NOT romantically/sexually attracted to, it is clear that he implicitly (if not explicitly) recognizes that sex and romance are not inherently co-contingent upon each other and sex is separated from (though can be compatible with) both romance and friendship in his mind. This is not to say that Maurice is aromantic: he clearly feels romantic and sexual attraction to both Clive and Alec, but notably, he conceptualizes his attraction and desired relationship as platonic, not Platonic. His partner is his Friend first AND he is his Lover. On the other hand, Clive chases a romanticized Platonic ideal that allows him to sublimate/repress his romantic and sexual attraction into an ideal that is more tolerable to society AND slowly destroys his friendship with Maurice in the process.
All this is to say is that E. M. Forster's vision of love and romance as "a friend that you have sex with" manages to capture an understanding of love that breaks down amatonormativity, challenges the conflation of romantic and sexual attraction, and grounds the idea of partnership in something that is tangible and real. Its conceptual construction places friendship, genuine human connection, and affection at the heart of such a relationship without necessitating or denying physical or sexual expression of that attraction. In a heteronormative, amatonormative world where so many straight couples are together who consider romantic relationships more important than platonic ones, and often don't seem to have anything in common with their opposite sex partner or see them as a human being (see: jokes about how one partner "doesn't understand how men/women work" or "you can't tell what women are thinking", seeing their partner as part of an inscrutable class, not as an individual), Forster's conception of partnership through Maurice stumbles across a radical, queer vision of relationship that puts friendship first without denying the existence of romance or sex, whereas the idealized amatonormative vision of relationship expressed through Clive based on intangible, divine, mysterial connection ultimately fails because it is not based on anything real and represses everything that is real.
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
stormborns
