If you're a good Amish girl, you're courting, you have three or

In the hush between barn-light and dawn, a saying is passed down like a lantern: “If you’re a good Amish girl, you’re courting, you have three or four different beaus, and you go out and stay out all night. That’s just their tradition. They date under the covering of night. No one knows who they’re dating or seeing until two weeks before they’re going to be married. It’s how they’ve done it for 300 years.” Beneath its plain words moves an older river: the wisdom that love grows best where noise is low, where the eyes of the village are kind but not devouring, and where time—unhurried, star-fed—can test the mettle of two hearts without spectacle.

The ancients would recognize this rhythm. In many homelands the moon has always been the chaperone: harvest dances after sundown, whispered vows on roads of dust, the measured gait of courtship hidden from the market’s applause. The Amish way, as told here, makes a hedge of darkness to keep romance small enough to be honest. Courting begins not as a parade but as a pilgrimage; beaus are weighed like apples in the hand—by scent, firmness, and keeping quality—before one is chosen for the wintering of a life.

“They date under the covering of night”: the phrase holds a stern tenderness. Night does not erase accountability; it hushes performance. Without onlookers, a pair learns each other’s quiet tools—how they speak when nothing needs selling, how they listen when silence is the better bread. And because no one knows until the appointed season, false starts need not harden into public quarrels, and fledgling hopes are spared the frost of gossip. Privacy is not secrecy-for-its-own-sake; it is a greenhouse for vows.

Consider a small true tale from the countryside: after Sunday “singings,” a boy in a black buggy would offer a girl a ride home. The lanes were starlit; her doorway waited, lamp trimmed; sometimes the talk ran to scripture, sometimes to the price of hay, sometimes to how many quilts a household needs when babies come. Weeks turned to months. No posters, no posts, only steady miles. When, at last, the families were told—two weeks to a married feast—there was little surprise among the discerning, but much relief that the love which grew in shade could keep its color in the sun.

This tradition, told across 300 years, is not a fossil; it is a tool. Cultures choose their tools based on the work they hope to do. The desired work here is durability: marriages that begin without a theater, households that value ordinary heroism over glitter. Multiple beaus at first? This, too, is craft—comparison without cruelty, a way to see soul against soul until the one needed voice is clear. The late hours? A training in patience, in carrying comfort through fatigue, in learning what the other keeps saying when the day has no more polish left to offer.

Yet the proverb holds a mirror to all of us beyond the farmlands. Our age loves the loud beginning: declarations tall as billboards, affection tallied in likes and echoes. The Amish cadence reminds us that love is an artisan’s discipline: measure twice, cut once; test quietly, choose publicly; guard the seedling, then plant it for all to see. The lesson is not to copy another people’s rites whole, but to borrow their wisdom—let intention lead attention; keep romance accountable to family and community, but safe from the market’s appetite.

Take from this a simple rule and its rites. First, honor privacy that serves promise: before the world intrudes, let your courting learn its own breath. Second, practice breadth before depth: meet a few worthy beaus, not to hoard options but to choose without self-deception. Third, set an unveiled horizon: when the bond is sound, tell your circle and prepare—give your “two weeks” not by number, but by clarity—so love can migrate from night to noon. Finally, remember that every tradition is a tutor: ask what habit in your house helps fidelity grow—shared chores, shared prayers, shared silence—and keep it. In this way the old road through the dark will teach your feet to find the light, and your promise, once spoken, will endure when the stars are veiled.