If one of them was a girl, rabid fans wouldn't make nearly as much noise about them being a couple. In fact, you'd probably get some fans rallying against that notion. I've noticed woke shippers have this grudge against fans pairing male and female friend characters together. It's wholly hypocritcal because fangirls are famous for pairing two characters of the same sex (typically male) solely on the grounds of a strong friendship, regardless of how blatantly platonic it is or any feelings either character may have for the opposite sex. Terminal fujoshis have done this with Voltron, Sherlock, really anything that has good-looking guys who are close with each other. I've even seen seemingly Tumblr-unfriendly series like IASIP get the slash treatment. Logic, context, ethics — none of that matters if it gets those ovaries going.
(I know this post is pretty exclusively about slash fangirls, but that's just because it's the most common kind of "shipper" out there by a long shot. Young women/girls making fan content for slash pairings is practically ingrained into fandom culture, it's easy to forget about the amount of "femslash" content out there if that's not what you're into.)