Help me sort this out

I was seeing a guy off and on since July. It was never super serious – I was dating other people and assumed he was too. We would hang out maybe every couple weeks and then it sort of tapered off in the fall. I basically gave up on him around Thanksgiving because he seemed to be not making much effort at all and mostly e-tethering.

After a few weeks of no contact I decided the right thing to do might be to give him an explanation for how I read his level of (dis)interest rather than leaving it up in the air. He responded with a surprisingly lengthy text about how he thought it was the other way around – that I wasn’t very interested and he didn’t want it to seem like he was stalking me. To be fair, he had asked me for the majority of our dates, though he also was somewhat flaky with planning and would leave things to the last minute, which I don’t respond to well.

We had a pretty good conversation, and it was illuminating to me how I may jump to conclusions and read into things. I have a tendency to be emotionally unavailable and overly cautious, so from what he was saying I started seeing it as a misunderstanding mostly caused by my own issues. He was enthusiastic about talking again. Keeping in mind what he said about not seeing much effort on my part, I asked him if he wanted to meet for dinner. He told me he had guests that weekend, but would follow up after that. More than a week passed and nothing. Eventually he sent me a lame text, he’d been sooo busy, blah blah, no mention of getting together. I responded politely. Fast forward 2 MORE WEEKS, and I had completely written him off. Once again he texted me yesterday as if no time had passed, finally asking me if I’m free for dinner this weekend. I said “to be honest, it seems like our styles of communication and making plans are not in sync, so I think it’s better we don’t continue this. I truly wish you the best!”

I expected that to be it, but again he wrote out a super long defense of his actions and blamed the whole thing on me. Told me I’m just “frustrated that we have different lives” (wtf?) and basically that he didn’t owe me the courtesy of communicating that he’d be off the map for almost a month because I never share anything with him. It all sounded like gaslighting nonsense. I stayed cool and just reiterated that we’re obviously both frustrated and not seeing eye to eye there’s no sense dragging it out. The conversation ended on kind and civil terms and we seemed on the same page about things just not being in the cards.

Then today he asked me again if I want to get dinner and I had to repeat the same things I told him yesterday. I’m perplexed, and it’s become so convoluted. On one level it seems like an obvious case of lukewarm interest, but the fact that he puts so much effort into defending his side of things is confusing. Is that just an ego thing, like he can’t see himself as the bad guy? How could I have handled this better?