I want to be careful with this one, because the word pretends is heavy and the person typing it is usually already hurt. If you are searching for signs he pretends to love you, something has not been adding up, and the not adding up is real even if the word turns out to be the wrong one for it. So I will take the question seriously, and I will try not to be cruel to either of you while I do.
The plainest thing I can say is that what you are looking at is a gap, between what gets said and what happens on ordinary days. That gap is observable. Whether it comes from pretending, or from wanting to mean it and not managing to, is not something you or I can see from outside, and I think it matters less than the gap does.
Why I would not use the word pretend
Pretending implies a plan, and most people are not that organized. The more common story, from the letters I get, is somebody who says the words because they are true in the moment, or because he wishes they were, or because saying them is the fastest way to make a hard evening stop, and who then goes back to living exactly as before. That is not a con. It is a gap between what somebody can say and what he can carry, and it is very ordinary, and naming it plainly is not the same as letting anybody off.
The reason the distinction matters is what it does to you. If you decide he was pretending, you have to rewrite the whole of the last year as a performance, and most people cannot do that and stay upright. If you decide instead that the words were real and the days did not keep up with them, you get to keep the good evenings and still act on the gap, which is a more survivable place to stand. Most lists of signs he pretends to love you are really lists of things that hurt, and hurt is real without being proof.
Signs he pretends to love you, or the gap between the words and the days
So here is what I would look at, and none of it requires reading his mind. The wall calendar in your kitchen is the best instrument I know: the plans he talks about, the trip in the spring, the dinner with your friends, the weekend at his parents, and whether any of them arrive on the squares. A future that lives in his sentences and does not reach the calendar is a gap you can see without interpreting anything.
The second is the arithmetic you have been quietly doing, about who reaches out first most weeks, who rearranges, and who remembers the thing that was said on the Tuesday. If you have been keeping that count without meaning to, the count is not the problem, it is the finding, and you would not be keeping it in a relationship where the answer was obvious.
When the words arrive
When the words come tells you more than how often they come. I would notice whether the warmest things get said at particular moments: after you have pulled back, at the end of a fight, at midnight, in the week after you mentioned leaving. Warmth that arrives as repair, reliably and only when something is at risk, does a different job from warmth that arrives on a Wednesday for no reason, and you can see the difference from your side of the table.
I would also notice what happens in the daylight after a big statement. Some people say a large thing at night and are slightly ashamed of it in the morning, and go quiet, and that quiet is not proof of anything except that the statement was more than they could stand behind at breakfast. It is still worth knowing which kind of statement you are being given.
Who is doing the translating
There is a job in some relationships that has no name, and it is usually done by the person who is searching for articles like this one. It is the job of explaining him to your friends, who have asked once or twice in a careful voice, and to your mother, and to yourself on the drive home, where the version of him you present is usually a little more present than the one who was actually in the room.
If you are doing the translating, you have already noticed the gap, because translation is what people do when the original does not make sense on its own. That is not you being foolish. It is you being loyal to something you wanted to be true, and loyalty is a decent quality being spent in a place that may not be paying it back.
What only a conversation can settle
I cannot tell you whether he means it, and I would be lying to you for money if I pretended a card could. What I can tell you is that the gap between the words and the days is a fair thing to put to him, out loud, in his own words: you say this, and then this happens, and I would like to understand it. His answer will tell you something. What he does in the three weeks after his answer will tell you more, and that is the part worth watching rather than the speech.
If he becomes angry at the question itself, or you find that you are frightened to ask it, that is a different situation and it deserves more than an article, and a counselor or a helpline is a better place to take it than a search bar. The what is he thinking page goes further into the tired that comes from being half chosen, and the is he stringing me along quiz puts the pattern in front of you in plain words, with no mind reading in it.
What is worth doing this week
Before the weekend, write down the last three times he said he loved you, and next to each one what was happening in the hour before he said it. Keep to the facts rather than the verdict: what time it was, what had gone on that day, whether you had been quiet with him. Then look at the calendar on the fridge and count the squares with the two of you in them for the month ahead. Those two pieces of paper are more honest than any list of signs, including mine, and you made them yourself.
Come back and tell me what the hour before looked like, all three times.
Clara