The guy (26M) I (24F) was goin out with told me he's not ready?

Ok listen, normally this would be a done and next page kinda thing but I'm confused, my best friend is confused and my sisters are too.
A little backstory, this guy didn't know me and I slid into his DMs and after like a month of back and forth he asked me out.
We had two dates, one day after the other, we had a really good time and after like a week he called me and told me that atm he has a loth of new things and paths opening up to him and he needs some time to think about it and whatever, he obviously said the "I like you sm and I had an amazing time with you, etc" bit, he also said the typical "we can stay friends", and this has never happened to me but apparently he really meant it. He's been texting and asking questions and showing a lot of interest and we're not talking about dumb subjects, we've been talking about deep stuff. On the call he said that he still wants to go have like coffee with me and he made a lot of jokes so also not the usual call, I also thought it was weird he called me since we went on back to back dates so I felt like he didn't owe it to me.
Since he said that im not putting the same effort as I was before so if he reaches out I will answer but if he stops answering im not looking for him again but I also firmly believe that guys don't want to have girl friends so I feel like there is something else going on and I don't really know what.
Also, on my side I think it was a good call to stop going out, don't get me wrong, I like him so much and I would like to keep going out with him BUT now I don't feel any pressure towards the conversation, I'm not overthinking on whats going to happen if he takes a lot of time to answer, or what will happen if we don't have subjects to talk about anymore or how much time am I going to take to answer him and blah blah.
So.. wth is going on?