It means 1 of 2 things. Either he wanted less pressure to answer fast, with everyone. Or he wanted you to stop seeing when he reads your texts.
The setting looks the same either way. So the setting is not where the answer is. What else changed around it is.
Free to try. We never store your chats.
"Why would a guy turn off read receipts." The lists say he is hiding something, or he is pulling away, or it means nothing. Each of those is true for someone.
None of them has seen how he texts you. Some people turn it off the week they get a new phone. Some turn it off because a group chat was stressing them out. Some turn it off because of 1 person. A list cannot tell you which one you are looking at.
1 more thing before you read into it. "Delivered" with no "Read" can also just mean he has not opened it yet. You may not know for sure that he changed anything.
This is the part people skip. A setting is something he did. It is not something he said.
It is easy to spend 2 days drafting a reply to it, as if it were a message. But there is nothing in it to answer. The last thing he actually said to you is still the last thing he said.
Look at the week the "Read" stopped showing. Then look at the weeks before it.
A single change is not a pattern. 3 changes in different places in the same month is.
What happened right before. If it went off the day after you asked "did you see my text", he may be asking to be watched less. That is different from it going off on a random Tuesday.
Whether it is everyone or just you. On some apps it is 1 switch for every chat. On some, like iMessage, it can be turned off for 1 conversation. You usually cannot tell which from your side, and asking his friends to check will cost more than it tells you.
Nothing about the setting. "Why did you turn off read receipts" puts him on trial for a button. Even if the honest answer is harmless, he now has to defend it.
Answer the last real thing between you instead. If he told you about a job interview, ask about it. Something like: hey how did the interview go
That keeps the conversation about the 2 of you, not about his phone. And how he answers it tells you more than the setting ever will.
If your text is the last one in the thread and it has not been answered, a 2nd one reads as a reaction to the receipts going away. Wait.
If he has asked for space, or blocked you, or told you to stop, then the setting is not the story. Do not push contact. Let it be.
Sending nothing today is a normal result. It is not losing. It just means the next message should come from something real, not from a switch.
You paste the conversation and it reads him against his own history, not against a list — how fast he usually replies, what has been changing lately, and whether this is new for him.
Then it writes the reply back in 4 tones, and tells you if the better move today is to wait instead of sending anything.
Try it on your conversation