Does my friend like him or is it just subconscious reaction?
This one will have a lot of background information, so I apologize for that. However, someone trying to answer the question might need it. For reference, A is the girl in question, J is the boy in question, and C, D, and F are three of my friends.
Alright, so for a couple of months now I have been hanging out with a guy who's fairly new to my main circle of friends. I was familiar with him before, due to him being on stage crew building the sets for our school musical and drama and the fact that his older sister and my older sister were friends before they went to college. However, now that he is doing the musical with my friends and I, we've all started to get much closer. The only one of us who really knew him before was A.
According to A, many boys like her or have liked her, including J. Out of these many admirers, some of them I noticed, others I never met or didn't get that vibe until the other girls confirmed it for me, and others I just never met so I cannot say if she's right to think that they like her. However, based on some of the things he does, I do think that J likes her. He always seems to be smiling around her (even though he smiles around some of the other girls too so it's hard to tell with this sign...), he hugs her first when he hugs us good-bye, and when she leaves the group and he comes back to it, he looks around like someone's missing. My other friend, C, told me that she thinks he likes her as well.
About a few weeks after hanging out with him, my friends, D, C, and F began to show interest in him. C told me flat out that she likes him and always finds excuses to touch him, D flirts with him obviously, and F flirts with him subtly. His neighbor also flirts with him, but both of them told me that it's a game that they play where she pretends to love him while he pretends to be creeped out by her. I thought that this was funny, so I told my mother and sister about how everyone loves him now. That turned out to be a big mistake, because according to them, he likes ME, and now they tease me all the time about him.
They both think he likes me because he offers to drive me home every day after practice, despite the fact that we live twenty minutes away from each other. He also drives home another boy, but he drops him off first, which is weird because it's a bit out of his way to do this. They claim it's because he wants to be "alone" with me. However, he only does this because he's a nice guy. The only two times he's acted weird around me were when he starred in my direction many times during a couple of practices (but I was sit with D and C so it's probably them he's checking out) and when he was glancing around the room one time and I told him, "A will be right back; she hasn't left yet," and he gave me a bit of a nervous look (but that's probably because he realized that I know he likes A.) They just want me to date him because his family has money, he's wicked smart, and the boy I do like and I are not together yet.
Anyway, a couple of days ago, when C told me that she broke up with her boyfriend in hope that she and J would start dating, she also told me that she was going to back off because A told her that she likes him. At first I was a bit confused by this, since apparently, J has liked her for nearly a year and she has never shown any interest. However, I noticed her starring at him during practice and realized that she's been smiling a lot around him lately. After J drove me home that day, I rushed inside and told my sister and mother that J and A were going to be together so they can stop pairing J and I together. However, they both told me that she does not actually like him. Their claim is that she feels threatened by all of the attention he is getting, so to make sure that he's "hers," her subconscious has tricked her brain into thinking that she likes him. The fact that she claims that she has a lot of lovers and has never shown interest in him for the year that she has known him is their proof for this. However, A has never seemed like the jealous type, and they might just be saying that so I don't begin to back up a bit from him. It didn't really help my thought processes when they began to point out childish things such as, "J never drove HER home!"
What I'm trying to ask is whether my friends or my family are right. Based on what information I have gathered, do you think that she actually likes him or that she just feels intimidated by the other girls flirting with him and thinks she likes him because of that? A's only really been with a boy once because of this guy who was a total creep to her when she was a sophomore and the fact that she doesn't fall in love easily, and J has told me a couple of times that he has always had bad luck with girls. Therefore, I really want them to end up together. However, if there's nothing there on her side, then I'm not so sure that I want to put in some supportive effort in case his heart gets broken.
