Advice on being patient, am i being to patient or not enough?

Okay I've never really been in a relationship before, fooled around with a few people but never actually dating (please don't judge too harsh). also this will be a bit long, sorry.
So a few months ago i made an account on match after a group of friends seemed to have got into relationships through it. i started talking to this one guy, im going to call him Simon, he had never really been in a relationship with a guy either so he was as new to this as me, and we seemed to make a connection. Then he went quite for a bit then at the end of the month suddenly asked if i wanted to meet. We had talked about meeting eventually and I was a bit taken aback because he had been silent for almost a week and a half, before that we messaged each other 4 times a day at least. So I said yes and we arranged a time and place, even showed each other what we looked like (we both didn't use pictures for our profiles).
Now i am a bit overweight and geeky looking so i thought there would be no way hed be interested and would change his mind (i had given a verbal description just like this one to him but describing and seeing are two different things). but he said he still wanted to meet.
so we met at a local Costa and it went really well, we chatted for hours about all sorts including what he is studying at college, our families and all sorts but nothing to do with us being gay, neither of us brought that up. He's not out to anyone but a few friends whilst im out to my family and a few friends. we left saying we would definitely stay in touch and that we would both like to see each other again.
and we did meet up again but both of us were only free friday afternoons or the weekend. We've met up a few times and gone to the cinema and had some really nice times. However we still had never brought up the fact that either of us was gay, although obviously we already new it since we met through a dating site. even online we had never talked about dating experiences and what we wanted this to be (friendship/relationship). So i brought it up online and we agreed we would talk about it. we met in town then went to his college and talked in its park. there was a bench set with a roof and we chatted during a thunderstorm, which was amazing. we learnt alot about each other. he said he really liked me but that due to the messy relationship he had had with a girl before realising he was gay he was cautious about getting into relationships since that last one had left him really hurt. so we agreed to get to know each other more before we take it to the next step.
we havent met up since then though we have been in contact. Now here is the problem; between all of those meetings there is a large gap where i will send a message like "how are you doing?" or f i know im going to be free "do u wanna meet up?" and i know he has seen it since its usually through facebook that we talk, and it always says when they saw the message. but it takes him a whole week, sometimes longer just to reply to something like that. i know how hard his course subject is and other things that are happening in his life means i wont be able to see him all the time, but should i have to wait a whole week for a reply to one simple message like "how are you?"
I never push him for an answer, i send the message and then wait for his reply. Every time he does reply he is apologetic saying that he saw the message and was going to reply later but then his workload got on top of him and he forgot, which i can believe given his subject matter. however im very self concious of my appearance and whenever he doesnt reply for a long time (the longest being 11 days) i start to wonder if he has lost interest or if i am being to attention seeking and frightening him off. it got to the point when i thought "thats it, hes not interested" and started going on match again to speak to someone i had met on match before simon. we got talking and i started to wonder whether i should arrange to meet this guy and see how it went. but then i got the apologetic message and everything went back to normal.
I really like simon but its been a month since we last met and during that time ive had three messages with one taking that 11 days to answer too. everytime he replies it makes me feel really happy that he is still interested but should i ask for sooner replieswhen i know he is busy? i still wanna see him but what do you guys think of all this?

 

that sounds good, maybe ill try that, though it sounds a bit like trying to trick him into talking to me.