When there is speculation based on letters about people like Lincoln (and Joshua Speed) or Hamilton (and John Laurens) being in love, its often said how men were much freer in how they expressed feeling even in platonic friendships, and were more flowery (a favorite descriptor Ive seen) in prose. But aren't there enough examples of non love letters to be able to distinguish ones that more can be read into? Interested in what makes it so complicated.
There's always more to be said on this subject, but I wrote a bit about this topic in a Tuesday Trivia some time ago. I'll paste it here:
Romantic friendship is one of those topics that comes up here from time to time. Basically, "romantic friendship" is the term used by scholars and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for very intimate friendships (usually but not solely between two people of the same gender, and usually but not solely two women) that were characterized by very tender language, professions of love and devotion, and sometimes even co-habitation. People tend to fall into two camps over them:
One camp says: the way we express friendship today is not the objective and only way to express friendship. People during this period genuinely believed that close friendships should border on romance, and that it was admirable for two women to be so attached to each other that they cried when they parted and wrote letters about how they're counting the hours until they meet again, etc. It was completely possible for these to have been romantic but not actually romances in the sense of the word today.
The other camp says: these were most likely actual romances. If we saw a letter from a man to a woman in 1847 that stated
... the swelling within me of my love for you, the pride I have in you, the majestic reflection I see in you of the passions and affections that make up our mystery, throw me into a strange kind of transport that has no expression but in a mute sense of an attachment which in truth and fervency is worthy of its subject.
(as Charles Dickens wrote to William Macready on November 23 of that year), we would generally assume there to have been a relationship with a sexual component, so it is inconsistent to treat relationships between two men or two women differently. Sexualities other than heterosexuality existed in the past but have gone unnoticed except when the people with them were charged with criminal offenses for acting on them, which also tends to bias the record toward men who were attracted to men. Just because outsiders to these relationships catalogued them as friendship doesn't mean that we have to be similarly ignorant.
I tend to fall between the two camps myself. While I personally incline more to the second - when I read a letter between two participants in a Boston marriage (two women living together for decades, supposedly just banding together as two spinsters) the romantic love just leaps off the page - it seems unlikely to me that every single romantic friendship was actually a romance that other members of society simply didn't pick up on, especially given the criminalization and extreme disapproval of same-sex romance and sex. Georgians and Victorians weren't total innocents! It's not as though it would have never occurred to anyone that two male friends who lived together and made grand gestures toward each other might have The Wrong Kind of Friendship. Plus, I have to admit that modern day buddy movies often end up showing the same kind of thing in their bromances.
My conclusion? That we should be open-minded about both the possibility of erotic romance in historical situations where we can't 100% know what happened, but that we should also remember the hundred other ways that people in the past weren't just "us but in costumes".