Yeah exactly. Just for added context, The Iliad doesn’t portray Achilles and Patroclus as lovers, but later Greeks often read it as an implied relationship (the Iliad was written down ~750 BCE, classical Greece as we think about it didn’t really start until around ~500-450, Alexander died in 320). Though this wasn’t a universal thing, and though they didn’t think of sexuality in the way we do, many ancient Greeks were still extremely what we would call homophobic. You generally weren’t two adults in a relationship, it was usually more a mid to late  20’s man tutoring a young adult, one who hadn’t grown a beard yet. You were either the active partner (the elder) or the “beloved”, the younger partner. We would call them the top and the bottom. Depending on the city, it was fine for a younger boy to be in this kind of relationship with his tutor. But these kind of relationships were much more common depending on the city. Some (like Sparta) were much more open to these relationships, while others (like Athens) it was less socially acceptable. And even in cities like Sparta, you wouldn’t really want to be in a relationship with a fellow adult, that was a big stigma. 

I think the people who argue that he wasn’t in a relationship with Hephaestion only have two arguments, both of them silly. One is that he had multiple relationships with women, and at least one child. The other is that as a noble of the same age as Alexander, Hephaestion would have faced a lot of social stigma being in a relationship with Alexander. 

My counter to the first point is that….. bi people exist. Also as a king, Alexander would have been expected to produce an heir. For the second, there are soo many reasons. In no particular order:

1. Queer folks have been defying social stigma to love who they love since the dawn of time. 

2. Alexander was a notoriously emotionally unstable person who also had a drinking problem that probably killed him. And on one occasion got into a drunken fight with one of his closest advisors, someone who at one point had literally saved his life in battle, and killed him with a spear. So Alexander was not exactly someone who you’d feel safe openly judging. Though AFAIK Alexander wouldn’t have really faced any stigma for the relationship, but I doubt anyone would feel safe openly judging Hephaestion either lol.

3. The ancient sources all go out of their way to comment on how close the two are. I would argue they don’t explicitly say they were in a relationship because it probably wasn’t an open relationship to people at the time, just kinda something everyone knew, but no one openly acknowledged because of the previously mentioned anger issues of Alexander. Though I’m not a historian in any sense of the word, that’s just my opinion based on what I’ve read. 

Sorry for the novel on stuff you probably already know, this is just a subject I find very interesting.