This guy doesn’t have a strong interest in you.
If he never initiates text messages but replies back, he is keeping you as an option but he is not dedicated in trying to woo you.
A guy who behaves in this way is often talking to other women that have a lot more priority to him than you do.
Being that you met this guy on an online dating website, there is a good chance that he is talking to and meeting other girls.
He has a good idea of which girls he is the most interested in getting to know and date.
You are lower on that list of girls.
He is hoping that he will be able to date the girls that he holds on a higher level of priority than you.
The majority of his energy is focused on wooing these girls. As a result, he never initiates text messages to you.
He is more preoccupied with initiating text messages to the girls that he is most interested in.
However, he replies back to your text messages because he wants to keep you around as a possible alternative in case none of the girls that he is interested in work out.
By replying back to your text messages, he is hoping that he gives you just enough encouragement to keep up with those texts.
This way, he can always come back to you as a last option if he fails at wooing the girls that he is more interested in.
A guy that you met on an online dating website never initiates text messages but replies back because he would rather you chase him.
He may be the kind of guy who doesn’t like to chase girls.
He may have had a lot of success in getting girls to like him by simply allowing them to do all the initiating.
He may have been this way before he even joined the online dating website.
This is a tactic that he has used in the real world of dating and proceeded to continue using when he started online dating.
In never initiating text messages to you, he is making himself out to be the prize.
He wants you to look at him as such.
He doesn’t want to chase you and make you the prize as a result.
In making sure that he never initiates text messages, he knows that he will get you thinking and wondering about why he never initiates text messages to you.
He replies back in order to keep you encouraged to continue trying.
As long as you keep having these kind of questions in your mind, he is going to be constantly in your thoughts throughout the day.
This is what he wants.
The more you think about him in this way, the more emotionally invested you become.
Every time you give in and initiate a text message to him, he has won a minor victory.
This ultimately puts him in the power position.
He also knows that the more you initiate text messages to him, the more you will want him to return the favor.
However, he knows that by not returning the favor in initiating text messages to you, you will continue initiating text messages to him.
Hence, it just becomes a continuous cycle.
The goal is to make you chase him.
As long as he is able to do that, he knows that he has control over this interaction.
He knows that the longer you keep doing this, the harder it will be for you to simply drop him and move on because you would have had a real investment of time and effort.
When he is certain that you are fully emotionally invested in him, he will then be able to take advantage of his relationship with you in whichever way he pleases, without ever having made any real investment in it.