I find that people often like to talk about love without the specificity it actually needs - not because they don't understand that parental "love" is something different to romantic love, or love for your work, or love for a family member - but because it feels more "human" to talk about love as a very general concept, because a lot of people's hopes and beliefs (especially the hope or belief that there is something deep in their existence) can be included in that term - the more general, the more it can potentially include. This goes especially for "true love", where I feel the feelings are distilled and separated from the imperfections / impurities of the humans that are the object of that love and without whom it could not exist - creating a paradox that is nevertheless somehow ignored. Again, in my opinion, because people put their hopes and beliefs in the term "love".
With this in mind, I still can't really decide whether the "couple" in the story is in love, whether they are on their way, or whether it's just friendship. It's not because there is too little information, it's because the situations and especially conversations seem to be so central to the story, that the relationship of the people is almost secondary. It's as if they enjoyed talking to each other, rather than being terribly interested in a definition of what it is they have between them. I guess what I felt from it is that their feelings are not really growing in intensity (at least not from the part of their lives the story portrayed), but just "exist" in their original way.
So while lovers' love grows with time, their "love" appears to stay the same, and because of that, the romantic moments are almost "not romantic", because that heightened sense of awareness of the other person that happens in those situations seems to arrive much slower for them - it always felt romantic only at the very end of the situations, and I feel that - if I had to describe them - they are enjoying one another's personalities and conversations, and the romance between them is resulting from those conversations, rather than from their feelings (to one another).
In any case, I enjoyed it a lot. My first VN that I played in 2012, in fact.