OK - the setting is a cafe instead of a symposia, and the man is not as eloquent as Socrates and his cronies - but he is defining and describing love as he knows it. I think his thoughts of love and beauty are similar to Eryximachus' and Socrates'.
As a physician, Eryximachus views love in a scientific manner - there are loves and desires both healthy and diseased. The man speaks of the science of love he has created in order to gain a better understanding of it. He says he was a "sick mortal...love was like a smallpox", he boozed, fornicated and committed any sin that appealed to him. And he figured out how men should love, instead of loving a woman first, one should begin with a tree, a rock, and a cloud - the healthy beginning of love - kind of work your way up to the "sacred experience" of loving a woman.
As Socrates recounts Diotima's wisdom concerning love, he too, speaks of the steps in progressing to the ultimate love and beauty. But it starts first with appreciating physical and external beauty then, appreciating beauty of the mind, beauty of institutions, laws and sciences, and finally an understanding the nature of beauty - the purest understanding.
The man in the cafe started developing his science because he lost a woman he loved, he then began to appreciate the beauty of nature and love of all things as a way to get back to the love of a woman - his ultimate goal. The speakers in The Symposium saw physical love shared with a woman as the basest expression of love. For Diotima, the ultimate goal is the creativity of men, not through the body, but through male intellect.
All the males in the Greek "men loving men" group would reject the man's goal to learn of love and beauty so he could someday be worthy of loving a woman.
I think the man telling the paper boy he loved him, was not an expression of Greek male love, but was part of his progression in loving anything and everything to attain his goal.
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