A question mostly for the guys, but if any ladies can read men like books, it's for you too.

Guys: you are impossible to figure out sometimes. So I’m going to present you with a scenario. Say you’re in a relationship with a girl—but you don’t really think there’s anything there anymore, and you don’t really want to be in that relationship—you’re just going through the motions because you can’t figure out a way to end it peacefully. And say that you meet another girl who’s in the exact same situation. You become friendly with this girl, chat with her every day. In your daily chatting, you find out you have so many strange things in common, right down to something you thought you were the only person alive who had this certain quirk.

So you flirt a bit. You talk a bit more. You share very personal information. You tell her things that only your current girlfriend knows. You trust her implicitly, and you tell her so. She’s told you she trusts you implicitly. You’re pretty close friends at this point.

ALRIGHT. Back to the girl’s point of view. She’s into this guy. He flirts when his girlfriend isn’t around, and you flirt when your boyfriend isn’t around. Yeah, you both know it’s not right, but you’ve also talked about it and you’ve both established that neither one of you is really in the relationship, and since you’re only verbally flirting, it’s not all that serious. She thinks he just sees her as a friend… a good friend… one he can have fun with and be flirty and everything’s okay. Then all of a sudden, one day, he wants to talk about more intimate things. He asks intimate questions, and tells her intimate things about himself. Really intimate. Both are pretty turned on by the conversation, and both have acknowledged it, but that’s as far as it goes. No propositioning, no “I wish I could blahblah with you” or any of that stuff.

Now for the question: How does he feel? She doesn’t want to ruin how they interact now by throwing a serious “where are we” question out on the table. Obviously you can’t speak for this guy, but speaking from a man’s point of view, if you have a close female friend, do you speak so intimately with her? Or would you only get that intimate if you had feelings for her?

I’m a known member of Fluther. I’ve been here for nearly a year at the very least. However, the person I’m asking about knows I post here and would recognize my name.