He hasn’t asked you out on a date even though you have known each other for a while.
This isn’t by accident.
Additionally, he rarely or never flirts with you.
If anything, he encourages you to get out there and date, convinced that you would be a great girlfriend to some lucky guy someday.
This is a man who wants to be just friends.
He isn’t thinking about you in any other way but that of a platonic friend.
Whenever he hangs out with you, it is always around other friends or in a crowd.
Even when you sequester his attention in these moments, he doesn’t spend too much time engaging with you.
He talks to you for a few minutes and quickly gets bored.
Soon after, he makes his way to someone else in the vicinity or a group of people so as to engage with them.
A man who wants to be just friends isn’t shy about telling you of women he is romantically interested in.
If you have established a significant amount of trust with him at this stage in your relationship with him, opening up to you about women he is attracted to will soon become a staple.
While interacting with you on the phone or during a hangout with other friends, he asks your opinion about some girl he likes at work, school, the gym, etc.
Since you are a girl, he wants to glean information from you to get further clarity on her behavior so that he can ascertain whether she is attracted to him too.
Basically, you become someone he uses to figure out whether something this girl did or said to him the other day was a sign that she likes him.
This is a man who wants to just be friends.
On the other hand, a man who wants to date you constantly flirts with you whenever he has an opportunity.
Whenever he is hanging out with you among friends, he pays special attention to you and makes far more eye contact with you than he does with any other girl in the friend group.
He has private conversations with people in the friends group who are closest to you, asking them questions about you that he never asks you.
These questions are more personal in nature, such as those that relate to men you have dated in the past.
This is how he attempts to gain information about your past history in dating so that he gets a better idea of the kind of men you are attracted to in both looks and character.
If you keep hearing from your closest friends in the friend group that this man keeps asking them questions about your dating history, there is a very good chance that he wants to date you.
He hasn’t pulled the trigger on asking you out on a date because he isn’t sure about how you feel about him.
He is fearful of asking you out on a date and getting rejected.
That would be a blow to his self-esteem.
Additionally, he worries that asking you out on a date could jeopardize his friendship with you if you aren’t interested in him romantically.
With these fears, he holds off on asking you out on a date until he is almost certain that you like him too or you make the first move in asking him out first.