User blog comment:Yamhi78/Who do you think is the girl that Gray would end up with??/@comment-99.240.210.97-20140922021401/@comment-7418318-20140922083930

If you go by an interview there's something you should keep in mind though: Time.

If you read the afterwords in the manga volumes, you'll see that the Hiro Mashima didn't fully map the story out from start to finish, but for the most part is writing it arc by arc. That means the story can grow and even occasionally goes into directions which Hiro didn't expect when he started it. That in turn means there are plenty of plans and ideas get scrapped or changed along the way (Mavis being male, Wendy being a Water Dragon Slayer, Lisanna not returning into the story or the whole concept art of Lucy submitting to Zeref to give a few examples).

So the older this interview is, the less relevant it is for the current point of the story.

Apart from that "more than friendship" does NOT automatically equal romantic love. Sure it might mean romance, it might mean a shallow replacement relationship that'll unwind as soon as the true love shows up, something completely un-romantic or a whole load of other possibilities. It's far too vague to say anything for sure.

Let me give you one possible other way to interprete it as an example:

In a way every Fairy Tail member has more than friendship for their guild mates, because they consider each other family. This line you quoted might be interpreted as the two of them feeling like siblings to each other. And the thing that Erza isn't getting from Jellal is the security and support of a stable family who are always there when she needs them. With his status as a wanted criminal, Jellal can't give Erza that stability and security, no matter how much she loves him. And with her great inner insecurities (now less than pre-TOH arc, but still there) that is an aspect that Erza really needs to cure the wounds in her soul (which I believe is a process set in motion after the ToH arc, but not yet complete).

And with Gray being the one member of the team that knows Erza the longest and the only one of them who saw her crying by herself by the river, he's also the closest to this brother-like position.