Why would a guy friend behave like this??

[Bluemoo]

I hope this is a long story short! I am confused so any insight would be great - thanks!

I recently fell for one of my guy friends - at first we genuinely were just friends for several years and we used to talk about anything and everything. Then he started dropping hints into the conversation, whether on purpose or not I don't know, that he was interested in me. I had a boyfriend at the time and we weren't getting on very well - that is one of the things that we used to talk about a lot and it seemed to be that he persuaded me to finish with my boyfriend when I look back at it now. When I did finish with him and I told my guy friend he seemed very shocked but pleasantly surprised by it. The flirting increased since then - he always touches my hand when passing me something, if I touch him or lean on him he doesn't move away but seems very comfortable with it, he gives me those stares and raises his eyebrows often at me, we have had more intimate conversations about relationships/preferences and his past girlfriends which he never talked to me about before and on a few occassions lately he has displayed jealousy over my other guy friends.

I know he is shy with girls and he told me a while back that he would never make the first move and even point blank deny to a girl that he likes them if they try to get close to him - he couldn't say why he does this as he didn't seem to understand it himself. Anyway, knowing this, I decided to one day pluck up the courage and somehow drop it into conversation and to try not to overbear him - I hinted at being jealous that he might like another girl and I think he got the message but didn't seem to believe that I might like him.

From then on, he continued to flirt, especially when we were alone but we were never really getting anywhere with it, so I decided to pull back a bit and try and return to normal as obviously nothing was going to happen.

Then he seemed to get upset with me for not being so flirty and became a bit cold and unsure with me but when I did flirt he responded well and his mood changed with mine. This continued for a while so that sometimes we were completely ignoring each other and other times quite obviously flirting even in front of others.

Then recently he has started being quite rude to me in front of his guy friends as if to show me up so I completely ignored him altogether which strangely upset him.

I had talked to our mutual guy friend about my upset of his confusing signals but he obviously being a guy, couldn't see my side of it as he wasn't there when he was super nice and charming to me. Then my 'guy friend' also spoke to our mutual friend because he was upset that I'd ignored him and couldn't work out why. Anyway, the upshot of it is, that the mutual friend told my guy friend that I was upset because I wasn't sure whether he liked me or not after I had declared to him that I liked him and he hadn't made it clear whether he reciprocated those feelings or not. He denied ever having flirted with me or giving me any ideas that he was interested either before or after I had declared my feelings to him and supposedly couldn't understand where I had got the idea from that he might be interested atall! He did say that by being rude to me (which obviously his friend had witnessed), that he thought I should have got the message that he wasn't interested although that was only recently after I had been off with him because I didn't know where I stood. But why then, when nobody is around be polite, nice and even seem nervous/shy with me?

I am quite confused about this, especially as he was the one who started giving me the ideas in the first place. Before that, I was quite happy to just be his friend but as he kept dropping more and more hints, my curiosity obviously got the better of me.

I would really appreciate, if someone had some insight into why a guy would behave like this - if so, please share it with me?

[spiderowl]

Sounds like an insensitive idiot who's just playing around and enjoying your attention. I'd avoid him altogether. Think about how all this makes you feel, regardless of what he says is going on, and then act accordingly. I've been in a situation with a guy who flirts like anything then backs off suddenly and pretty much declares I'm just a friend. After this happened a couple of times, I realised that it was hurting me. I don't flirt with guys who I feel just want to be friends. I felt he was really flirting with me and I'm not imagining it because mutual friends thought he was taking me out! As soon as I realised his behaviour was hurtful, I backed off and now treat him as a friend I only see occasionally when we cross paths. I've found it's best not to listen to what people say they are doing but how it makes me feel.