Hmmmm... what are the choices? Is there any way you can feel besides however you do feel?

OK -- and it's certainly worth noticing that that's what you find yourself thinking.

Now obviously, neither of us has any way of knowing what he's been thinking during all this -- unless he happens to tell us, of course. Wouldn't it be a riot, though, if it turned out that he was afraid you weren't going to like him any more -- and that he didn't say anything to you online because he was waiting for you to show him (in some way) that it was OK to? Like... maybe he was afraid you'd finally seen him for who he really was or something? We don't really know whether any of this is so, of course -- but as long as we're making stuff up anyway, why not make up stuff that we enjoy?

I'm not saying that I actually have, or ever had, self-esteem issues but it's not that hard to imagine that, at a certain time in my life, I might have felt most comfortable around someone who was worried about what I'd think of them -- because that just might keep them from noticing some of the stuff that I was afraid might turn out to be wrong with me.

So I'd say there's a possibility -- no guarantee, but a definite possibility -- that you were both waiting for each other to reassure you that you were OK, and that when neither of you made the first move, each of you feared that it meant you weren't OK. I think that's called "crossed signals" or something.