My (M/36) friend (M/30) is throwing around the world "love" more
I (M/36) have a very close friend (M/30) and we for sure have a mutual attraction. But we haven't officially started dating but we might as well be already as we spend a lot of time together and we're both emotionally vulnerable to one another.
With him, I noticed his increasing use of "love". Unlike my ex, his use of "love", though, is centered around my words ("I love what you wrote!"), my actions ("I love how you handled that presentation"), my circumstances ("I so love that about you"), my appearance ("I love this haircut on you") and sometimes us ("I love how we want to eat the same cuisine right now")
Until recently, he would never use "love" as often. Could he be warming up to saying he loves me. The reason why I think this was is because of my ex in college. Before he said "I love you" to me for the first time, I noticed he would use the word "love" more and more, more so than usual.
There's a lot of plausible deniability at play, he could very well be loving those things.
Have any of you experienced this? What's this phenomenon called? It's like he's trying to be comfortable saying "i love you to me" or getting me used to it