Why is she always so nice to me and put in so much effort for me?

I can’t tell how this girl really feels about me. One on hand, she’s a very extroverted and open girl who’s one of those “mother hen” types. But when she and I met 3 years ago, she took a vested interest in me. She thought i was really interesting and funny. My friends have all said they think she obviously has a thing for me, but I won’t/don’t believe them.

We don’t live in the same country, so we communicate primarily through text, but she never fails to remind me how much i mean to her and how much she cares about me. She’s always saying how great i am, how she’s glad she met me, and how easy it is for her to trust me in ways she doesn’t feel like she can trust other people. We also send each other birthday gifts when our respective birthdays roll around. We’ve kept in consistent contact for all 3 years, and she’s even come to visit once. She’s always talking about how I should come visit her sometime, so I plan to go visit her next summer, and she invited me to stay with her and her family.

On the other hand, again, she *is* one of those extroverted/over-friendly types. I worry she just keeps me around so she can have a friend from a foreign country, but out of every American she’s met, I have remained the one she’s closest to. If anything, she’s expressed to me that she’s afraid i’ll meet some other German who’ll take her place in my life.

And while I know she values and cares about me very much, I still wonder if it’s romantic at all. She’s just been putting such a tremendous amount of care and effort into our relationship for so long now that I wonder if there’s anything more than me just “being interesting”.

I would just directly ask, but I feel like that make things awkward between us, seeing as she’s dealt with boys from her home country doing the same thing.

Oh and i once dropped the comment that some of my friends theorized that she had a thing for me to her earlier in our friendship, and she gave a total non-answer. I don’t know if the answer’s changed by now lol

i’m not expecting anybody to just *know* the answer based on what i’ve explained, but just any sort of insight/opinion would be great

tl;dr - can’t tell if a very friendly and extroverted girl that I’ve been close friends with for 3 years has feelings for me or not. She puts a great deal of effort and care into our friendship and making sure i’m happy (we both do), so i’m wondering if there’s more to it than just a simple friendship

Thread already exists, (below)

https://www.enotalone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=552951