Every time I see the extraordinary care with which academics treat Patrochilles I get a little sad. Like, ofc, in the ACADEMIC world, it is a worthwile endeavor to treat any alleged romantic relationships (especially unspoken ones) with care and skepticism but the same care and skepticism is not excercised nearly as often for heterosexual couples, if ever.
Also, maybe keep that skepticism to the academic world??? When you're teaching history in primary/secondary school, you very rarely have time to delve into all the pro and con arguments for a historical relationship so you need to keep it fairly simple. If a student is very interested they might go on to study it at uni/in their own time (thanks JSTOR) and THEN they'll have time for scholarly debate about a couple.
Until that point, please just let us assume that people were couples bc I'm tiredd of not only having to prove my own queerness but also the queerness of any historical figure who was probably queer in some way but there will always be some proof that they could be straightTM (which is a very modern concept btw)
People need to understand that there is a time and place for academic debate and also for just generalising and making a few (reasonable) assumptions.