Ex-Amish social media creator Lovina Hershberger Zook, who has amassed some six million followers sharing Amish recipes and stories, explains the traditions of dating in the community she grew up in, one of the most conservative among the Amish.
— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) August 14, 2026
The 23-year-old tells @faithsalie… pic.twitter.com/tRylTEwCZm
That made me think of this "Modern Love" discussion in the NYT: "Am I Too Anxious for Love? Jenny Singer worried the deep, loving relationship she wanted wasn’t something her brain would let her have" (gift link).
So I would obsessively over-analyze social interactions. Like, I felt a feeling of fear that was, like, irrational. I start feeling hyper sensitive.... I was like, “act normal, act normal, act normal.” In the past, I had felt like, oh, this dating is so low stakes... but with this guy, I was like, “get him to like you,” which I think for anyone is a totally unhelpful inner monologue. And for our third date, he asked to take me to dinner, which to me was so like, “oh my God. What, do you want to open a bank account? Do you want to get a mortgage? Why are you being so serious?” “Let’s keep going to bars.” It felt so serious, and I felt so horrified by the idea of going to dinner with someone I liked, which was something I had certainly never done with the dog guy and had rarely had occasion to do in my whole dating history.... It was crazy because it wasn’t like, oh, no, I’m going to get spaghetti on my chin. It was more like, I don’t want you to watch me have any human needs. For some reason, I want to be perceived as seamless and without need. And there’s something about a restaurant that really makes that impossible...
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54 comments:
talk and sleep - but no sex.
Ok. Sure.
The Japanese should try this
If that works - sounds alright to me. While odd, at least their isn't any coercion.
If I were the parent, I would not be comfortable with this.
This is like the Scandinavian “night dating”. Except the sex is explicit in that culture.
OK, I guess that explains why I never see an Amish family with fewer than 3 kids.
"which was something I had certainly never done with the dog guy"
Man that's ruff. To be so personally unimpressive as to be remembered as "the dog guy". Dog guys need love too!
A 👨, a 👩, a 🛌 🏩 #BLM
It is very difficult to get in bed with a woman for seven hours and just talk or sleep. Unless you're married for more than 40 years.
Hasn't anybody heard of a bed board? Of 'Bundling'? This was a common courting practice in old New England. A bundling board was placed between the couple and would spend the night, chastely. Good way to find out if your prospective partner snores or farts in bed, before tying the knot.
I did this with my half Spanish, half Mexican-American, devout Catholic high school boyfriend.
He was a year younger than I was; I'd just graduated, and he (with his parents' permission) invited me to stay with him for a week at his aunt and uncle's place in Madrid (I lived in England and he lived in the Netherlands at the time; getting to Madrid wasn't as big a thing as it sounds). When I arrived, I learned that he and I would be staying in one room in the family flat. There were two twin beds, which we sometimes occupied separately, and no sex (depending on what the definition of "is" is, which is to say nobody... um... went the distance, so to speak), though I won't say we kept our hands entirely to ourselves.
The Amish thing sounds like bundling. A common courting practice back in the day.
Crossed in the ether, Aggie!
First, the Amish persist by allowing/encouraging their noncoformists to leave with the Rumspringa "go wild" period. The ~90% who choose to stay in the culture are then committed adults who rarely fight the system. Those who leave join the general population (also see the forced ejections of aggressive young males by the polygamist factions associated with Mormonism).
Second, the Amish are a small homogeneous culture where the greatest need is to avoid medieval-style cousin incest. They 'get along' because they are exposed to a narrow and predictable culture, they chose to stay after Rumspringa, and they then get along and go along with the available mating partners.
Simple, old-time tribal methods like this are great for producing large families. Maybe not any complexity, but they are good at this.
I watch her cooking channel. She is quite funny. Very engaging with a cute accent. The interview seems exasperated by the Amish dating process, but seems a lot more straight forward than the disaster that is dating these days.
Why do young college educated white women hate themselves? We Boomers arent like that.
At age 18, that would have been a sleepless night for me and an 8 hour long erection.
There is a mixed race pasture chicken farmer who has a YouTube channel in which he narrates his videos using the voice of the character Putty from Seinfeld. In one of these shorts he showed the same Amish girl as we see here. Killing plucking and gutting a chicken by hand. If that doesn't get you horny, men, there's something terribly wrong with you.
As with (non-separatist) Mormons, I find a lot to admire in Amish culture. Downsides too, of course - how much inventiveness comes out of a culture that voluntarily eschews innovation?
I mean, I guess it's pretty inventive, from an argumentation standpoint, to find ways to rationalize the use of pneumatic tools and devices, gasoline-powered hand tools like leaf blowers, and electric scooters, all of which I saw in use by otherwise Amish-appearing people in Lancaster County, PA. (My understanding is that each community decides for itself what forms of modern technology are acceptable to them. Many Amish construction people, for instance, will ride to jobsites with Mennonite friends, who, in contrast to every Amish community I've ever heard of, are often allowed to drive cars as long as the cars are black and plain. In that part of Pennsylvania, Amish workers are much sought after for home construction and remodeling. But then there's the dark side - dog breeding, where they don't come off smelling like a rose.)
@Enigma, excellent explanation. I've read that among the Amish the girls are especially important at bringing the boys back from Rumspringa. Amish girls rarely run wild (most don't even wear 'English' clothes during the period) but they say if an Amish boy gets a car, he's done for. Because they can only marry internally, if an Amish boy wants to get married - and he has to not to be shunned - then the girls are usually the ones that keep them from going so far into English culture they don't come back.
I've always thought of Amish girls as looking like peak Kelly McGillis under their frocks.
"At age 18, that would have been a sleepless night for me and an 8 hour long erection."
WRT my week of bundling at age 17, yup... pretty much. Or the female analog thereof, anyway, for me, and exactly as described for my boyfriend, every time I, well, checked. (Until he told me to stop, well, checking so he could get some sleep and maintain his virtue.)
The Amish guest on Theo Von's This Past Weekend podcast (Episode #607) was a young man named Timothy (often referred to online as the "Young Amish Male" or by his social handle @amishdude_). He appeared on the show in September 2025 while on his Rumspringa from Minnesota.
I wonder if they allow soaking like the Mormons do? I like how they get a bunch of their friends to shake the bed.
the early snore-test/ snore compatibility is smart.
Peanuts cartoon 60s, Charlie and Lucy lying on a bed each having a head at a different end their feet meeting in the middle. "What's so great about being in bed together?"
At the center of Amish life is a devotion to God and His revealed Word, from which everything else flows. This is why they seem so enigmatic to the rest of society, which, even among professing Christians, is predominately secular. This has never been a formula for societal approbation, and history is full of examples of persecution of Amish and other sects seeking to remain aloof from the society in which they exist. See, for example, Jews in general and the hassidim specifically. The Amish often see themselves in the same "chosen people" way and retain that identity also in the same way, viz., separation/isolation. Wisely, they acknowledge that mating, family formation and child rearing are too important to be left to the whims of adolescent "romantic love," which waxes and wanes.
A matriarchal culture led by men is the model of human existence.
Sounds brilliant to me. Sure, sex may happen, but then that suggests the relationship is about lust and immediate gratification rather than the long haul. Sort of like the infant brownie test.
My own marriage began with a phone call that lasted from 9pm to 6am, so I understand precisely the value of such a conversation.
"A matriarchal culture led by men is the model of human existence."
You keep saying that. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Amish husbandry…
Snoring is pretty rare in young adults unless they are seriously overweight. It starts over age 40 or 50. Ask me how I know.
I'm questioning how Amish this lady is. Most Amish do not want to be photographed, let alone videotaped. They regard it as a "graven image" forbidden in Exodus 20:4.
This was standard American practice in the eighteenth century:
It was not unusual for courting couples in late eighteenth-century New England to spend the night with each other—often in their parents' homes and with their parents' permission. Andrew Burnaby, a young Englishman who was traveling through the North American colonies in 1759-1760, reported as follows: "At their usual time the old couple retire to bed, leaving the young ones to settle matters as they can, who after having sat up as long as they think proper, get into bed also, but with out pulling off their undergarments, in order to prevent scandal.” Other visitors from abroad noted with astonishment that parents generally knew about and condoned these overnight visits. The young couples in question were not necessarily even betrothed—they had sometimes known each other for only a brief time. Some parents did require that the young people remain partially clothed—“bundling” in contemporary parlance. This was an attempt to prevent the couple from engaging in sexual intercourse, though the high incidence of pre-marital pregnancy suggests that this strategy was not entirely effective. By the late eighteenth century, between 30 and 40 percent of New England brides were pregnant.
— “Courtship and Sexual Freedom in Eighteenth-Century America,” OAH Magazine of History. Many more articles at JSTOR.
The last part is where "shotgun marriage" entered the lexicon.
When you're doing hard manual labor all day, you probably aren't really up for, um, hard labor at night. I imagine a lot of them fall asleep right away. CC, JSM
"Howard said...
I've always thought of Amish girls as looking like peak Kelly McGillis under their frocks."
Me too.
In 2017, with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, I read a new biography of Martin Luther. It mentioned in passing that when Luther got married, he and Katrina, like all other German couples of the time, had the wedding night before the wedding ceremony. One last check that everything was in working order and Tab A fit Slot B. CC, JSM
Is there a board between the couple--just in case the conversation gets too intense?
That is similar to the historic Norwegian custom of night dating. The custom was brought to America, but they didn’t have the special rooms that they often had in Norway. My grandma was born in the USA in 1883 to Norwegian parents and she hated it when her older sister’s beaus would visit because she shared a bed with her older sister’s and the boy would sleep/talk/whatever between them at night.
Are Amish ever naked?
John Mosby - do you have the author of the Luther bio?
an 8 hour long erection...
Training for life without Viagra
There are very differing facets among the Amish. I live near them, and have Mennonite friends as well. I used to joke that if I ever went on a crime spree, it'd be in Lancaster/Lebanon counties in PA. No phones, no guns, cash. Purely deceptive. Almost every Amish household (and we could be talking about a 60 acre spread with 4 or 5 houses for the married kids) will have at least one cell phone. Many have generators, and you'll often find cars hidden in a wood patch. They're running out of land here in PA, so are heading west. The did make our excellent kitchen cabinets. I have also had them do copper work on a 30 gallon mash tun.
Lyndel Roper. CC, JSM
"Makes sense" if you've never lived in a man's body.
A good Amish date is churning butter.
That may only be a euphemism for what's really going on.
No beans or taco bell.
Beeno? Rusty!?
The point here is to get people paired off and making babies ASAP. The quicker they do it after puberty, the quicker they continue the culture and settle into stable jobs and roles. Employers love it when single male employees marry, for they then shift attention to houses and babies and schools and don't quit their jobs.
Every fertile generation in history has understood sex; in the recent past they mostly lived on farms and watched the cows, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, and ducks do the deed. They all knew how it works from a very young age.
Comparison is the enemy of joy. Meet. Mate. Be happy.
Overnighting in a bed cuts to the chase and admits to facts in evidence.
"they say if an Amish boy gets a car, he's done for"
One weekend afternoon we were taking a drive through Lancaster County, when my husband noticed that, unusually, we weren't gaining on the horse-drawn buggy in front of us. Well. He hates to follow people, especially if there's a good chance the leader might slow down a bunch, so he sped up to put us into a position to pass on the next straightaway.
At said straightaway, he passed the buggy, having to accelerate quite a bit. Driving the buggy was an Amish teenage boy with an Amish girl beside him laughing and holding onto her bonnet for dear life. The boy was laying on the whip; that horse was MOVING*. The boy, it seems, was driving a sportscar-equivalent, and showing off for the girl.
* I always heard that Amish folks were one modern destination for retired racehorses. Certainly all the buggy horses we ever saw were beautiful specimens - no nags.
n.n said...
Beeno? Rusty!?
Hey! Let's not get personal.
If you rinse your canned beans in cold water before cooking that added benefit disappears.
"The boy was laying on the whip"
She should tell him to spare that horse, then ride thee brethren.
If anyone is interested hearing a real Amish courtship story, check out the YouTube channel called Montana Haven. Google the episode called "Our love story - how we met". They are ex-Amish, but were still Amish at the time of their courtship. They did talk about some non-Amish things like using phones, and taking a plane trip but no bed sharing.
Good idea. It's all about the communication.
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