You cannot tell from 1 text. "Want to grab dinner this week?" looks like a good sign on its own. It can read very differently next to the last 6 months.
So the answer is not in the message you keep rereading. It is in how he treats you compared with how he treats everyone else, and in what he did the last time things looked this warm.
Free to try. We never store your chats.
You send the text to the group chat and they say he likes you. Or they say he is just a nice guy. Either way, they are reading 1 screenshot of a man they have never texted.
That is also why lists of "signs he likes you over text" do not settle it. Emojis, fast replies, long messages, a lot of questions. Friendly people do all of that. So do people who are interested. A list is about men in general, and you are asking about 1 of them.
Friendly is how he is with everyone. Interest is when he is different with you. So you need a before and a next to.
Nice words cost him nothing. Following through costs him an evening. That gap is where friendly and interested split.
Who brings things up. If you started most of the last 20 conversations, the warmth in his replies is harder to read. There is more on who starts what in mixed signals.
What he remembers. Asking how your day was is friendly. Asking how the thing you were nervous about on Tuesday went is attention. Specific beats sweet.
Whether it is changing. If he used to be short and now he is not, that shift means more than any single nice line. If he has always been like this, you are looking at who he is.
Do not ask "do you like me or are you just being nice." Nobody answers that well over text. It asks him to name a feeling in writing, and the safe answer is always the vague one.
Answer the plan instead, and make it real. Something like: i'm in. thursday or friday?
That keeps it light and gives the plan a day. A friendly guy and an interested guy both say yes to dinner in theory. They start to look different when a real day is on the table. His answer, or his silence, tells you more than a week of decoding would.
If your last message already asked him something and he has not answered, do not add a second question. Let him answer the first one.
If he has told you he sees you as a friend, or that he is seeing someone, believe him. That is the answer, even if his texts still feel warm. Do not push past it.
And if you are about to send something only to find out where you stand, wait until tomorrow. A text written to get a verdict usually reads like one.
You paste the conversation and it reads the warm text against him rather than against a list — how he usually texts you, what happened after his last plan, and whether this is his normal way or a change.
Then it writes the reply back in 4 tones, and tells you if the better move today is to wait instead of sending anything.
Try it on your conversation