but I feel less assurance when I write a text only to get a response about an hour or two later

Geez. This is just insecurity on your part. I wouldn't want a partner that needs me to respond that quickly.

I'm not saying your behavior is weird, because a lot of people have those expectations nowadays.

20 years ago you would have to be lucky to call someone when they're home.

if you're worried that something happened to make them not want to talk to you as much, you should ask them that. they could genuinely just be busy, or just not understand that you value frequent texting in a relationship. randomly testing them by not initiating conversation isn't going to really help you understand what's happening, since if you're always the one who initiates conversation it's more likely they'll just presume you're busy or don't want to talk, which could make things worse

i definitely consider texting important for me personally, as i like a pretty constant communication stream. i have a partner who doesn't like texting as much, and i had to tell him i was worried about the lack of texting before he informed me that he just doesn't usually text much. which for me personally was fine once i understood it wasn't that he was mad at me or something (i have a tendency to overthink things like this too)

it's pretty important to be able to communicate your relationship concerns with your partner without fearing judgement, so if they respond poorly to asking such a question i probably would not personally want to be in a relationship with them

It can take me half a day to respond to my boyfriends texts and we live in the same house lol sometimes people be busy its nothing big. My general rule of thumb for texting is 24 hours for a response before I think something is wrong.

However i know how you feel I used to over analyse text interactions but my advice is this... Stop doing it, it legit will only drive you insane and the other party generally will be very confused by it. Most people i know don't think this way about texting and tbh I don't think its good for you. At least it wasn't good for me it made me very unwell.

Dnow if this helps but i kinda try and treat texting like email in my head and it helped divorce the "instant" part of from the way i perceive it. Easier said than done but take it from me, someone who spent the better part of my life hyper analysing everyone and everything. It gets you nowhere fast and results in pointless anguish.

Talk to your partner about your concerns.

That's my basic relationship advice. Talk to your partner. Talk about your feelings.

Advanced relationship advice. Sometimes the things people want are unreasonable. Sometimes people will say they want X, but X is really a proxy for Y.

A partner might ask that you don't go to a particular cafe. That's probably unreasonable. You shouldn't expect to be able to control someone's free time. They might be trying to ban that cafe because they're insecure and jealous of the waiter there. They're talking about X, the cafe, but the actual problem is Jupiter sized insecurity.

Don't do that to your partner. Don't demand they text you every two hours. That's unreasonable, and probably a poor proxy for something else.

Also don't ever "test" your partner by doing stuff like not texting to see if they'll text you. That's not healthy. I understand the impulse but it leads to bad places.

It is also possible that your partner is losing interest. Don't panic. It's not the end of the world. Most relationships end. Just talk to them.

I think one or two hours to respond is generally fine but yeah it also depends on the specific circumstances and the habits of the person.